Spirit's Digital Camera Learning Experience
I have a new toy, a fancy digital camera. Recently, I field-tested it at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships here in Dallas, and it was interesting. I just wanted to share my experience with working out the bugs, so that all my friends who are also thinking about digital cameras can have some information that can only come with actual usage. These are things you’d never think to ask, and which you won’t find in any user’s manual. And thanks to Davin for helping with some of this information.
If the only thing you ever use a camera for is to take photos of the wife, kids and dog during the barbecue, then not much of this is going to matter to you. However, if you take a digital camera on a vacation that lasts longer than 48 hours, or if you’re interested in photographing something fast or difficult, such as your nephew playing football or winning his first go-cart race, you might want to read this.
I decided I needed a digital camera partly because my old camera was getting beat up, but mostly because I have no use whatsoever for printed photos. All I do with my photos is scan the best ones and put them on my web site, so recording them digitally in the first place makes a lot of sense.
I now own a Fuji S-602.
This camera met my two major requirements: it has a zoom comparable to at least 200 mm (measured as 6X in the digital world); and it is capable of taking photos in relatively low light, as I sometimes take sporting photos at events where flashes are not allowed. Most low-end digital cameras will do neither.
It has voice memo recording; the ability to record very short movies; black and white photography; a multiple-exposure setting; I can attach it to my PC for teleconferencing; it can record a photo up to 6 MegaPixels (which is huge); it holds two different types of storage media at the same time, and I can tell the camera which one to use as its primary storage; the strap has a little holder for the lens cap so it doesn’t dangle; some of the things, especially the grip, are extremely ergonomic; plus tons of other stuff I’ll never use. Basically, it’s a pretty nice piece of hardware that will do everything except wipe your nose. What I especially like is having the zoom and flash in one self-contained unit, which I have never had before.
The advantages of this camera over an SLR are great, but they do not entirely take the SLR’s place.
Halfway through the Championships, I caused a bad problem with my camera and had to rush to the camera store to get it fixed. While there, I got all my questions answered, and found out some interesting things.
Film and Power
The primary advantage, of course, is that the digital camera removes the need for external help with obtaining my photos. No more trips to the photo shop, no more need to buy film. The hardware is expensive at first, but it will pay for itself in the long run. Also, I can see my photos immediately and decide right away to keep them or delete them. This is the best advance of all.
The images are stored on cards (like tiny floppy disks) that slide into the camera. You can spend a lot of money on a card which holds a lot of photos, or the opposite. Different cameras use different cards, and I was very intimidated at first trying to figure out which cards I could use both with my camera and with some other hardware I bought to help me store photos elsewhere (explained below).
In the end, I bought a CompactFlash card, which is one of the more universal and popular types of cards. I bought the model that holds 512 MB, which is just about as high as they go right now. This thing will hold 1,600 photos at 3 MP each. That means I can shoot and shoot and shoot for days without stopping to unload or reload. Of course, doing so means I have all my photos in one place, and losing that one card would be disastrous.
I’m taking a long Doctor Who vacation soon, part of which is going to be on a boat. I have this whopping huge storage card, but I can fill up anything, and as I recently found out (and as you’ll read below), I’m probably capable of damaging it and losing all that it holds if I try hard enough.
So I bought one more piece of hardware, a portable hard drive, which is basically an external storage device which plugs into a computer through a USB port. It holds some ungodly number like 20 GB. (It also doubles as a way to move photos from the camera to the PC, but the camera came with software that already does that. More confusion!) But the key thing about this little box is that I’ll be able to come back to my hotel room at night, move all my photos from the card to the storage device, and be empty and ready for the next day.
So I have eliminated the need for film. But this need has simply been replaced by batteries. Know this: digital cameras drink power like old Plymouths drink gasoline. There simply isn’t enough to sate the beast.
My camera takes 4 AA, and I suspect most do as well. The main power draw is the LCD screen they all come with. I am told that a lot of cameras have a manual viewfinder, and using that will cut down on the power needs. However, my camera has an LCD screen both on the back and in the viewfinder (I toggle between the two). And my need for sports photos is linked with my need for power. Here’s why.
My camera’s LCD screen switches off after 30 seconds of non-use. This doesn’t mean the camera itself switches off completely, it’s just a screen saver. But when I’m taking sports photos (or any journalism photos, really), I’m poised and waiting for a shot that might come at any second. During the first few days of the Championships, I lost several photos because the screen blanked out right before I was going to take the shot. Pushing any button brings the screen back, of course, but by that time, the shot is gone. This happened regardless of which screen I was using.
So I found a way around this: I pressed a harmless display option button every few seconds. This kept the camera’s screen alive and I got my shots – until the batteries ran down, which only took about 3 hours (total active time, not actual time) because I wouldn’t let the screen die.
My camera is supposed to display a low-battery icon when the battery runs low. More often than not, this icon fails to appear. Also, the camera is designed to switch itself cleanly to its "off" position when the battery dies completely. More often than not, the camera will simply stop functioning, without going through the motions of turning itself off. The guy at the camera store said neither of these things was unusual, even though such behavior is not mentioned in the user’s manual. It probably happens because the camera checks the battery power periodically, and if the batteries go kaput between checks, then the user will receive no warning.
So I bought a set of Nickel Metal-Hydride batteries. (NiMH – just think of the cartoon rat movie, and you can’t forget it.) These batteries are rechargeable. But (you guessed it) they come with their own complications!
The manufacturer of the recharge set I bought claims that I must let the batteries wear all the way down before recharging them, or else they’ll suffer a "memory" problem. The man at the camera store not only denied this, he actually told me the opposite: that if I let them run all the way down before recharging, they’ll actually wear out faster, and that the manufacturer only tells people to let them run down so they’ll wear out faster and people will have to buy more. He claimed he got his information from trade magazines, but the key thing for me is that he didn’t lead me astray on anything else that night, so I decided to believe him. We’ll see.
I was still capable of wearing out the batteries in a single day, so I eventually bought a second set. From now on, I intend simply to rotate the batteries, letting one group charge while I use the other. I believe it will work.
The camera also comes with an AC adapter socket. But I had to buy the AC adapter separately.
I could have also bought a large cumbersome external battery, which I could have carried by a shoulder strap. I decided that was too expensive and too silly.
This stuff will still pay for itself eventually, but I began to get really frustrated by the sheer weight of information and hardware, and trying to decide whom to trust. It seemed like the time in which all this stuff would eventually become worth the cost kept getting further and further into the future. Not that I regret it; as a shutterbug, this stuff is great to have.
If I were to re-shop for a camera today, I would definitely make "optical viewfinder" high on my wish list, simply to preserve the batteries.
By the way, after doing tons of comparison shopping and calling people on the phone for answers, time and time again I have come back to Wolf Camera. They even beat Fry’s in the battery-recharge department, as they had a battery-recharger that works faster, and their range of price-for-speed was lower. Their other equipment is priced lower, as well. At least, it is at their store on Greenville.
The Monitor
The screen is a split-second behind in showing reality. Even if I use the viewfinder, I’m still looking at a digital display rather than a mirrored view through a lens. Following fast action causes a very slight jittering effect. Not enough to ruin a shot, but enough to bug me at first.
When actually taking a shot, however, the image I record is always about a half-second behind the moment I press the button. When I brought this up with the man at the photo store, he said that was a by-product of digital camera technology and the manufacturers would probably never fix it since not enough people would be bothered by it. (I disagree, as I think digital technology will take over, at which point the editors of Sports Illustrated and the New York Times will scream for such precision, and it will be delivered when they ask.)
With SLR’s, the image is instantaneous – what you see when you click the shutter is what you get. Not so with digital. I quickly had to train myself to take the photo a split second before I thought I’d need it. So even when skaters were doing relatively slow spins or death spirals, it was still guesswork as to whether I would get a lateral profile shot (which I wanted), as opposed to a front or rear shot. Split-twists were a nightmare to capture.
One thing that surprised me the most: I could not use the large LCD screen to take photos because I lacked the coordination. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find the subject using just my hands holding the camera in front of me. I had to put my eye to the viewfinder like I always have. I don’t know if that’s a result of human nature or a result of such a long experience with an SLR that I can’t change, but for following fast action, it was the viewfinder or nothing.
Taking Photos
The shutter button had very little resistance to help my finger understand anything. It has a half-way-down position in addition to an all-the-way-down position, but I had trouble telling where it was. Sometimes, especially when I turned the camera sideways for a portrait, I could have sworn I had taken the shot, only to realize that the shutter button did not fully go down.
There is a very slight clicking sound when the shutter is pressed, but I can hardly hear it. The camera can emit a beeping noise to help me understand when the photo is taken, but I turned that off. I’m not going to have my camera beep at certain events, like figure skating, with people sitting all around me listening to the music, especially if I’m taking four or five shots in a row. That’s like listening to someone’s cell phone.
To overcompensate for the lack of feeling in the shutter button, I would sometimes press so hard that the camera moved in my hands because it was so light, ruining the shot. I have become accustomed all these years to letting the camera’s own weight offer resistance to my hand, and I simply haven’t become accustomed to the light weight of the digital camera yet.
Focusing
Digital cameras have auto-focusing, but for sports photography, that was the first feature I turned off. Everything I pointed the camera at, it wanted to focus on, which takes a couple of seconds. When they’re moving at speed, that’s not an option! I had to pre-focus on a certain area and wait for them to come by, but that’s not very different than SLR sports photography, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Once on manual focus, I still have a quick-auto-focus-once button (positioned in such a place that the strap gets in the way, which is irritating) to get me where I need to be, which was adequate for my needs, but beyond that, there’s no help. There is no set of split-focus semi-circles in the viewfinder, and I have to turn the focus ring manually many times to see any change at all. This isn’t a big deal, or at least, it hasn’t become one yet.
Color
I experienced a weird problem on the third day. One of the skater’s skirts was a purple-reddish color, but my camera shifted that color to the red, making it lighter. Some bluish-purple costumes were shifted to light blue. There was a clear difference.
I fretted all day that my camera was broken (or worse, that I had broken it). But at the American Airlines Center, ABC was running its television coverage through to the overhead screens, and I noticed the same thing on their images. I asked an ABC cameraman about it, and he didn’t know the answer.
The guy at Wolf did, or claimed to. He said it had to do with exposure compensation, something I have avoided learning about because it sounded too complicated, messy and trivial. He told me that the camera sees the entire world as gray – period. There is no color according to the camera. Taking photos which were largely composed of a large sheet of ice was flooding the viewfinder with bright white light, and if I set the exposure compensation (my camera has a whole button just for this feature), it should take care of the problem. I forced myself to read up on it some more and made the correction. It helped tons, and suddenly the ice had a whiteness that wasn’t there before.
He also told me that this is not a problem just with digital cameras, but with all cameras. I told him I’d never had to deal with it before, and he said it was because I’d always used film which was good enough to compensate on its own.
Taking Photos Too Fast
And now, the problem I caused on the fifth day, the Big Scare.
My camera takes about 1.5 to 2 seconds to record an image – another drawback from the SLR, which is only as slow as you can advance the film. (There are certain functions which I can use to take a series of photos in a much quicker succession, and looking back, I should have tried them. I didn’t think of it.) When I tried to take another photo while the previous one was being recorded, the camera simply wouldn’t take it. Except one time, when I apparently hit the shutter for the next shot too quickly, at just the right moment to cause the camera to get confused as to what it was supposed to be doing.
The result was a photo on the card which was now a bad file, and completely inaccessible. When the camera tried to display that file, it hung. Fortunately for me, the camera was smart enough to turn itself off after hanging for two minutes. I’m glad, because if it didn’t, my only option was to take out the batteries and pray I didn’t ruin my super-expensive CompactFlash card in the process. As it was, I was sick with worry that I had already ruined it.
Long story short – I managed to rescue the good photos from the CompactFlash card, then reformatted the card (the camera will do this, it’s essentially a super-reset button). This got rid of all files, plus the bad spot. So no direct harm done, but a very dicey way of learning a lesson. Plus, the moment when the camera was hung, a Pairs team was dancing right in front of me, providing what would have been one of the best shots I could have taken all week long. We’ll never see it now.
Lighting
When taking photos with the flash, I let the camera choose the aperture at 1/60 of a second. The resulting photo looks great on the scanner, but it is always too dark when I view it on my PC. I don't know yet how to force the camera to let in more light or to increase its flash power. It's a pain.
Summary
I now know why professional journalists still use SLR’s. For true journalism and sports photography, digital cameras are not where they need to be, yet.
I’ll still use my digital camera. I’m an amateur who can make do, and it fits my particular needs.
I spent a lot of money on my digital camera and the equipment that goes with it. But during the eight days of the Championships, I took around 700 photos. That’s about 30 rolls of film I didn’t have to buy or develop. With that kind of math, by the time I come back from my two-week Doctor Who vacation, all this equipment may indeed have paid for itself.
I hope this helps you make whatever digital camera decisions you might face. Learn from my mistakes!