Continuing the Experiment

[madshutterbug]

It occurs to me that there is supposed to be a bit of Nikon D70s review along with this (for my photography buddies).

It's a 6.1 megaipixel digital single-lens-reflex. As such, it uses Nikon's F-mount, and so all Nikon SLR lenses will work on the body. This is a good thing when one already owns a small collection. It has a built-in speed flash unit, much as is found on several of Nikon's SLR bodies (as well as Canon and other companies these days). There are several shooting modes:
Auto, which pretty much says it all. All settings (other than ISO, and even that may be set to Auto) are handled by the camera, so the photographer doesn't need to think about pesky things like shutter speed and f-stop, or the need for flash.
Portrait, which pretty much sets to aperture priority and sets the aperture fairly wide (small number f-stop) to decrease depth of field.
Landscape, just the opposite, small aperture (large number f-stop), to ensure great depth of field.
Action, fast shutter speed, aperture varies.
Close-up
Night Portrait
Night Landscape

Additionally, there are several other modes:
P: Program mode, which the user may customize as for the programmed settings.
S: Shutter Priority, photographer chooses shutter speed, camera sets aperture.
A: Aperture Priority, photographer chooses aperture, camera sets shutter speed.
M: Manual -- and this is what all my old Auto-Index (AI) lenses do to this camera. Good thing I like manual cameras.

Many (not all) of the butterfly photos in the previous gallery were done in close-up mode. Most of the general shots around Key West were done in Auto, though I tended to over-ride the flash setting to "No Flash." All of the shots in Cozumel were done in Auto, most with no flash (all of the shots of the reef are no flash).

	Parrot Fish With proper accessories, any camera may be an underwater camera. In this case, the proper accessory was a tour boat, where we sat about 4 feet under the waterline with a window on the world.
	Reef Fishies. The waters around Cozumel are very clear, and provide some excellent schnorkling and scuba diving conditions.
	Neon Streaks The bright blue stripes on either side of this fish proved quite hard to capture...
	Green... Brain Coral
	Green... Brain Coral
	Lunch For Barracuda This fishie was invited for lunch by Barracuda. This fishie declined, for today.
	School's In See the school of fish under the coral outcrop?
	Twin Ships Imagination (our ship) and Inspiration, both of Carneval Cruise Lines
	Costume This photo is primarily for costume notes; I saw some sculpture at a store here that gave me some ideas. Oh, and it served to separate me from a bit of cash, provided as tips for these two fellows.
	Canyon of Ships Just struck my fancy...
	Hefalump Towel art is a fine art aboard cruise ships. *G* This is our star Hefalump. I did use the built-in flash on this frame.
	Will Work For Peanuts Of course, we fed our star hefalump. No flash on this frame.

After photographing Hefalump with Nuts, we carefully moved him to a side table in the stateroom (with the nuts). It seems that the housekeeper responsible for vacuuming our stateroom thought so much of this that she started inviting all the other housekeepers to come see what we'd done...


There's some more from the Day At Sea, but I don't have them with me currently (finishing up a day at work, off the clock, posting photos). I'll post those later.

Overall, I'm not too displeased with the interaction between LJ and LJ's photo storage. The table is rather bland (I'd prefer to alternate photos from left to right, with text opposite as in this one), but hey, it's already paid for.

Comments

[madshutterbug.livejournal.com]

Haven't worked at a lot of macro yet; the butterfly pictures from Key West were mostly done using the Close Up mode, and the new lens which came with the "kit" of camera and lens. Some of those photos I recall being made within 6" of subject.

The kit cost about $1200; add in a bit more for a second battery. You will also need a Flash Memory card, the SD card which your CoolPix uses will not be compatible. As mentioned, I have three from an earlier version CoolPix which used Flash Memory, and used two of those on this trip, 96 Mb and 256 Mb. I expect this paragraph will probably show up in a more in-depth evaluation of the camera.

As for using it, it feels and handles like a SLR. Ruthann stopped trying to take photos of the fish because the CoolPix 4600 proved too slow to actually capture the fish; by the time it read the light, focused, and tripped the shutter the fish wasn't there anymore. The D70s handled the lower light and such with much better response. This also held true for some of the birds and butterflies in Key West.