August 1st, 2009 — Photography
So I have been putting my Nikon P6000 through its paces for the past couple weeks, and I am pretty happy with it for the most part, except for 2 things….
The battery life on this when using the GPS and an Eye-Fi card is abysmal, and that would not be an issue if the battery didn’t take forever to charge. Of course Nikon doesn’t provide a real charger, the battery has to be charged in the camera, unless you have the optional $30 MH-61 charger, which I understand only takes about an hour or so to fully charge the battery, then to make things easy I’ll probably end up getting another battery as well. There are a couple things that add to this problem, internally the camera get get hot with the Eye-Fi card, and since it is right next to the battery it makes the battery too hot to charge for about 20 minutes.
The other thing that annoys me is that there is no easy way to close the lens and keep the camera on, something like a standby mode. There are a couple of reasons this would be nice, keeping the GPS happy, because it makes me unhappy when I have to wait a minute or 2 for the GPS to sync because the camera has shut off and lost sync, it doesn’t happen all the time only when it is inconvenient. A stand by mode would also be nice to deal with things like the Eye-Fi card, the D90 and D5000 have a setting to tell the camera to not go to sleep until the Eye-Fi card is done doing its uploads.
Other then those 2 issues, the P6000 is a great little camera, and it fits the bill when an SLR is too much.
July 26th, 2009 — Photography
I did several searches on this problem. and I am still wondering if it is just me, because I couldn’t find a similar issue posted anywhere…
I went to the Delaware State Fair on Friday, and i had my Nikon D5000 with me, shot a lot of pictures or so I thought, because today I upload the pictures to my computer, and there is at least an hour of pictures missing. I know I took them, I have witnesses, and every-time I hit the button I could hear and see the shutter go. I wasn’t using the screen, and I was getting glare off of it so I had it turned around, so I don’t really know if the pictures were actually ever there. It problem occurred shortly after I mentioned to my wife that the camera and lens felt a bit warm, and I started hanging out in the shade, and I thought that if there was an overheat problem the camera would shut itself off, so I felt I was good to go. The weather was sunny and 82, so the temperature wasn’t overly hot (and well within the D5000’s specs of 102), but it was sunny, and we were on concrete, so there was not a lot of relief from the heat or sun.
While I was searching for the a possible cause to the problem, I found several references that mentioned that the camera would shutoff the sensor if it overheated and you were shooting video in live view, but not reference to shooting stills. I honestly feel that this may be a related issue.
So a word of warning, if you are out on a sunny day with your D5000, and it feels warm, check and see if it is actually recording the data.
If you have experienced this particular problem shooting stills, please let me know….
March 2nd, 2008 — Uncategorized
I have had my Olympus E-500 for about a year now, and I really like it. It has plenty of features, does what it is supposed to do, but where I primarily use a camera is while kayaking, changing lenses is not advisable.
The E-500 was my first choice, and I do not regret that choice at all. My second choice was the Olympus SP-550UZ, mainly because of the versatility of the lens.
So I was at the local Wally World the other day, and they had the SP-550 for about $100 or so lees then it was going for last year, and I had some extra money for various reasons, so I broke down and bought it. This is a nice little camera, and it has a lot more features then I expected. When I looked last year I was more interested, and I guess focused on the 18x zoom capabilities, then I was on any of the macro capabilities. Had I thought about it more, I might have gone with the SP-550UZ.
I had the chance to use the camera today in conditions similar to when I am kayaking and I am pretty impressed with the results. I do have a bit of a learning curve, but I think I have a grasp of the basics. I thing I’ll be in real good shape when I get the “My Mode” features set up with what I normally use on the water, and can easily switch between them.
Here are 2 pictures taken together, and I think it only took 2 button pushes to go from the Macro Mode to the the Telephoto full zoom mode.
This picture was taken from about 2 feet away, and the flowers were about a half an inch in size.
This was taken very shortly after the picture above, from about 60 or so yards away
I am very happy the results so far, and will probably have the SP-550 as the quick draw camera, and use the E-500 for the heavy lifting.
