OT - cameras??

My grateful thanks to all who helped to concentrate my thinking - Dudley in particular.

After looking at reviews and various deals, I settled for a Nikon D5000 body and 18-55VR lens from Camerabox - I'll have it in the morning. I was quite enthusiastic about an 18 - 105 but as it's £100 more, I eschewed it . ;o))

I have several cases - one is bound to fet.

Spare batteries from my favourite bloke at £16 each.

ever such a nice chap - small company & speak to a human straightaway.

- and some SD cards & off we go. It's our major Viking show in York this weekend, so hopefully pics next week ;o))

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Hi Kim

You don't hang about do you ?

Nothing like an important event to photograph first time out with the camera ;o)

Of course you will have read and memorised the instruction manual before you go :o)

I am convinced that all camera instruction manuals are written by someone for whom English is not their first or even second language and they merely translate the manual from the original japanese via Swahili and that have never actually seen the camera in question or any camera att for that matter!

The VR on the lens should give you 2 stops slower than you can hand hold normally. Just remember to switch it off when you put the camera on a tripod.

One thing I forgot to mention - get yourself a skylight filter to screw on the front to keep the front element nice and clean. Some of the camera suppliers now actually stock filters that are labelled up as lens protection filters - probably just a skylight anyway, ideally you want one in a slimline mount to minimise the risk of vignetting with the lens set to wide. The other thing that I would recommend is a lens hood, the

18 - 55 may even come with one - if it does, use it but you'll need to check for vignetting with the skylight in place. If there is no hood supplied the way around the problem of vignetting is to buy a step up ring upto 72 or even 77mm and use a bigger diameter collapsable rubber lens hood.

I look forward to seeing the piccies

Dudley

Given like-for-like comparisons (mainly in terms of mAH capacity and in the type of technology used) there should be little if any difference in battery life between any rechargeable battery makes (in fact many of them are probably made on the same production line in the same factory and given different labels). However if you have a camera which is designed so that the batteries can be recharged whilst still in the camera, it is probably best to stick with what the manufacturers recommend to ensure compatibility between the charger and the batteries.

Pete. G3JXC.

In message , Dudley Simons writes

I've not so far had a camera with a model-specific battery pack, but I have had many handheld amateur radio transceivers which had them, but which also had an AA-cell case option. In every case it was far cheaper to buy the cell case and fill it with rechargeables; in terms of pounds per ampere-hour, the manufacturers' sealed packs were much worse value.

I quite agree that alkalines are very much a distress purchase for use in cameras and other high-consumption kit; their very high internal resistance wastes a lot of power inside the cells, and thus delivers a terminal voltage under load which is lower than that given by rechargeables, which with their low internal resistance and fairly-flat voltage discharge curve deliver far more of their capacity to the load than an alkaline cell can.

There is very definitely a difference in quality between various suppliers of 3rd party batteries. When I was still using my Canon D30 I had some diabolical (Lion) batteries that after 20 or 30 charges were down to maybe 30% capacity and made Jessops own brand D30 batteries look pretty damned good!

The thing is with batteries made specifically for a particular camera is that they are or at least should be giving you optimal performance for the space that is available inside the camera body rather than trying to fit the cameras internals around 4 cylinders which waste a lot of the internal volume of the camera.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "kimsiddorn" saying something like:

In that case you could buy a 4/3 camera - such as the Olympus or Panasonic dSLRs which will accept your old lenses in fully manual mode. It's all about the register distance of the lenses and all the other, larger, dSLR systems won't work too well with the old Canon F series lenses. One slight drawback, which you probably won't notice too much unless you're a pixel peeper, is the small 4/3 sensor tends to be a bit noisier than its larger cousins, but it might be a worthwhile trade-off for you if it allows you to continue to use your stable of lenses. I'd suggest getting a kit lens with the digital body though, as you will find that fully-systemised auto-everything on at least one lens is handy to have, and the kit lenses are generally fairly good.

Depending on what you want out of the camera, throw a coin in the air and choose a Nikon, Canon, Pentax, et al. For there's nothing between them nowadays at a given price point - the image quality is all pretty good, and all you get is extra bells and whistles. Onboard video is useful, though, it must be said.

I shall of course glance at the manual, but I am a bloke and "reading the instructions" is for after you can't find the on switch ;o)) I will, however, print them off & take them with me ......

Is vignetting the repeated circles of light you get sometimes when the lens elements are not in agreement?

I didn't realise the VR was to do with camera shake, something which - thank God! - I still don't suffer from. However, it is a useful fall back.

I'm pleased to report that Camerabox took the trouble to ring me back and check various details of the purchase just to make sure it really was me as the card holder that had made the purchase.

All excited now! ;o))

Regards,

Kim Siddorn

Find a page on the GPS that displays time and take a shot of it prior to or immediately after the main shot. Use the offset feature in something like GPSync to make the correction.

AJH

I used Pentax kit (LX & MX bodies) for years, until a few years ago swapping to Canon A1s via cheap eBay kit. Can't beat them if you still want film. The EOS is my parents' old kit.

Now that's an interesting idea. I've not really looked into it seriously yet, but it might also be reasonably easy to pull the filenames out of the camera and dump those into the GPS and keep things in sync that way. (I don't have a GPS on this side of the Pond at the moment, so it's something I need to go shopping for...)

cheers

Jules

You could always use a road map and a piece of paper and a pen! Pete

I've seen this device - a 'GPS-logger'

advertised recently. I have no experience of it, but it looks as if it might be of use in linking images to locations.

Yes, that's what I do at the moment :-) Well, almost. I'm never quite organised enough to bring paper, but I always keep a few business cards in my wallet because the backs are useful to scribble things down on. Remembering to transfer the details somewhere more permanent at the far end is the tricky bit!

cheers

Jules

Hi Kim

Vignetting is where the corners of the image go dark because something is obstructing the light path - either inside the lens itself or more likely something in front of the front elelment - ie a screw on filter or a lens hood.

You can't always see it through the viewfinder but when the lens stops down as it takes the picture the effect becomes much more pronounced.

The VR isn't just for the crusties with shakey hands. It also allows mere boys with a firm grip and steady hand, such as your good self, to be able to use shutter speeds about 2 stops slower than you could normally get away with, to get certain photographic effects. Obviously if you are taking pictures of something moving such as a racing car etc you have to pan the camera, VR won't do anything to capture moving objects.

regards

Dudley

It's a technique used by openstreetmappers, the linux mapping tools allow the import onto the map. So for instance I can carry the GPS60csx and photograph it at the start, this gives me a second accurate sync with the camera. I then photograph street names and can upload these onto the gps trace in JOSM.

For work I take photos of things that need attention and do the same but use GPicsync, this has an offset facility that uses the calibration picture of the gps to sync the .gpx track and the picture. It then searches all the pictures exim data and locates them on the gpx track.

This can be saved as a googleearth .kml file so the trace and photos can be seen against the google earth background at any zoom level.

There is no need to alter anything in the file of jpegs or the gpx as GPic sysnc does all this and stores the positions in the .kml file.

AJH

Rest of it sounds sensible, but I'm not sure about that - images can become detached from the 'collection', google earth might not be around forever etc.

I think I can probably store coordinates in JPEG images as EXIF data, which at least keeps them 'local' to the image (although there's nothing wrong with storing them additionally elsewhere too, of course). And if JPEG can't do it, I can always convert to a format that can.

I'll take a look, anyway - thanks!

cheers

Jules

The file is a simple text file with the jpeg filename and its latlon.

It can burn the exif with latlon also if you wish.

AJH