An Old Timers Digital Adventure

Most of the people who know me would refer to me as a knuckle dragging Neanderthal who was drug kicking and screaming into the Twenty-first Century. I am still angry with Nikon, and Canon for no longer making a fully manual camera aimed at the professional photographer. With that said I must admit to buying a digital camera recently.  A client wanted to create a digital map of his company’s telephony equipment at various sites through out the Midwestern, and Southeastern United States . Going in I knew it was going to be a challenge to do it properly, little did I know that the first site alone would take approximately fifteen hundred images. Thankfully the client was smart enough to insist on shooting it on a digital camera. Realizing that I was going to have to learn more about this medium to stay competitive. I went ahead and purchased a Nikon Coolpix 990 to use on this job. This project has opened my eyes to the pros, and cons of the digital medium. Here are a few of my observations without getting deep into the technicalities.

Pros.

            First let me mention some of the more glaring benefits that I found with my new digital camera. The most obvious benefit was in organizing the images. I just downloaded the images onto a laptop computer that the customer supplied, and downloaded them directly to the customer’s intranet, after sorting them into folders, and naming them appropriately. The thought of trying to organize transparencies, or negatives in the correct order is enough to give me nightmares, as many of the images are almost identical. Being able look at thumbnails at the same time as I was naming the files made a major difference in the whole process. The overall quality of the images was extremely surprising to me. I had read in different publications that the quality couldn’t compare to film.  Using the camera was much easier than I had thought it would be. Once I figured out the controls it was a very simple process to get the image I wanted.  Setting the image quality to the normal setting gave me the image quality that was needed to satisfy the client’s needs. With a 32mb Compact Flash memory card I got an average of forty-three shots before I had to download. The cost of film alone would have made analog methods prohibitive.  The ability to see each image immediately enabled me to delete those that were unacceptable, and retake them right away. The use of tungsten lights could have been a problem using analog camera equipment requiring special film, or filters to get the proper color balance. How ever using the automatic white balance feature on the camera provided the correct color balance for the photographs.

This is a composite of three different images sewn together.

The first site took approximately 1500 images.

Cons.

          While the overall effect was acceptable I did find some shortcomings. The most aggravating was the difficulty in overriding the automatic focus. Once I figured out that I was limited to manually focusing in set fractions of a meter, or inch I was able to compensate by using depth of field to get everything in acceptable focus. Fortunately depth of field was enough to provide adequate detail in the important areas. I missed the flexibility of the old manual focus lenses to hone in on the most important details.

 On the weekends I took the camera out to different areas of the cities where I was shooting, and tried using the camera in different formats. Using the red eye reduction function created a problem with photographing people in that from the time the Pre-flash lamp fires, and the main flash goes off the subject may have moved, or changed expression. I also found that the auto-focus was not fast enough to use for action type photography. I was able to get some acceptable images of moving objects, but overall the hesitation between the time I depressed the shutter release, and the time the shutter actually fired made photographing moving objects difficult.  The narrow range of shutter speeds, and f-stops also created a problem. I took the camera to the ocean where I tried to use a slow shutter speed to blur the waves, but the limited range of f-stops resulted in over exposed images.

Conclusion.

            I can see that I will be using this camera for a wide variety of projects mainly for the ease of creating web ready photos. For some of the more action oriented projects I will continue to rely on my analog equipment, also for those times when I am planning on spending a lot of time out in the woods far from a ready source of electricity for my battery charger.

            Ó Edd Voss 6/29/2001

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