Schierer Space

As promised, I’m going to discuss a bit about what your hard earned cash will get you in cameras. I will be talking about Canon’s line of digital cameras because I know them the best, but if you have a different brand preference (e.g. Nikon, Sony, Kodak, Fuji) you’ll find similar levels, capabilities and prices. I’ll also only be talking about latest model new cameras. If you can find last year’s model online, or at your favorite retailer, you can get a pretty good deal for pretty similar capabilities. If price is your main object, you might be able to step up a bit in class for the same price if you get the previous model.
So the first question I ask somebody who’s looking for camera advice is: “How much do you want to spend?” Most people have a general idea where they think they’ll be comfortable, and I’ve found that lately, most are pleasantly surprised by what they can get for their money.
For what it’s worth, it is possible to spend more on a digital camera than on some fine automobiles. Hasselblad, made famous for most of us in relation to images taken by the Apollo astronauts, has a 39 megapixel digital camera called the H3D-II. Its regular retail price is 26500€ (~$37600). This is just slightly more than the rather nice all-wheel-drive BMW 328xi 2-door coupe. Needless to say, I don’t recommend one of these to any of my readers. I’m sure it’s a fine camera… but lets just say that if you’re reading this blog and you can actually afford to buy that camera, then please consider a small donation to the author of this site to support further camera testing.
Back to business:
I group digital cameras into basically 4 categories by size:

• Ridiculously miniature (RM)
• Normal (N)
• Got-glass-will-travel (GG)

and finally,

• single-lens reflex (SLR)

The power curve for cost vs. performance is somewhere in the fuzzy margin between N and GG. You pay more for more capabilities (upper GG and SLR) and for miniaturization (smaller N and RM). Highly miniature, highly featured cameras can cost as much as the upper GG categories. So what does this mean in dead presidents?

Here’s a summary table:

In order from most to least expensive… (more…)

My friends and family know that I’m a bit of a shutterbug. Usually this is because when we visit I spend more time taking pictures of their kids than talking with them. Ever since we bought our Canon G2 back in fall of 2001 (prior to our trip to the Salt Lake Olympics), I’ve been taking pictures of everything. We stayed loyal to the Canon line (partially because I already knew the symbology in the controls/menus, and partially because we could reuse batteries and media) when we made our leap into digital SLRs with the Canon 20D in the end of 2004.
Since then I’ve been extremely pleased with the 20D and there’s always some other filter or lens that would be great to have/play with/spend money on… so I think I’m hooked.
In any case, several friends have told me that they’re looking for a camera, and what do I recommend. This is a tough question for a number of reasons, but starting with the most important questions, here are my top 5:

1. How much do you want to spend? [Price]
2. What do you most want to take pictures of? [Lighting, Subject]
3. What do you want to do with your pictures after you’ve taken them? [Resolution, Images]
4. How much control do you want over what the camera’s doing? [Control]
5. Do you have a camera now? And if so, what do you like/dislike about it? [Loyalty]

[Last Thoughts]

Although I don’t plan to turn myself into a one-man Consumer Reports, I’m going to spend some time doing a few posts on how the answers to these questions (and others) should inform your new camera purchase. To start though, take a look at the questions that CR thinks you should be thinking about*.

In the end, the most important feature of a new camera is not being afraid to use it. 100% recycled electrons is what I like to say. The carbon footprint of a single JPG image on your media card is negligible, so the more shots you take, the more you’ll learn and the happier you’ll be.

In a continuing effort to get all of our digital images under some kind of organization (I’ve learned quite a bit in this process which I will share at some point), I have come upon a lot of lost and forgotten images and digital photography experiments. One such series of experiments, I’ve never really been able to share before because the files were simply too big for any kind of free web-space that came with a package ISP deal.
With the wondrous volumes of space now at my disposal and a bandwidth limit I’m not likely to exceed (unless I get burned by some-sort of slashdot effect), I am posting these (by 2002 standards) relatively large video products to the web for the first time. Feel free to comment what kind of download speeds you got, I’d be curious to know what kind of throughput this server actually manages.

So what are they, you may ask? And why are they cool enough that I, your dear reader, wants to burn my limited (?) download bandwidth viewing them?

These links direct to a series of avi movie files that were generated by setting my Canon G2 to fire off an image at a fixed interval. After collecting hundreds of these images onto a laptop, I compiled them into time lapse movies. We were living in Tucson, AZ, at the time, so the preferred subject were the monsoon rain clouds forming over the Catalinas.
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A shout out to Mom & Dad D who bought me the nifty close-up lenses a while back. I’ve finally started to use them the way they were intended. When K, N & I went for a walk on Sunday afternoon, I was able to get this interesting close-up shot*:

This one isn’t technically a macro shot, but at screen resolution it seems to be:

And remember that trip to the PCMoNH? Here are some of the fossils I found in their ‘dig’:

* If you’re not registered on the gallery, you won’t be able to see the higher resolution version of these shots, which are even more impressive.

Today I participated in my first official sailing regatta. Although my Laser remains nestled against the ceiling of my garage in its nest of nylon webbing, I have been getting in what sailing time I can. A friend from work and church skippers a Lightning. I was out with him once before, serving as the middle crew member. The Lightning generally races with a crew of three, the skipper, middle crew and forward crew. The skipper, of course, directs the overall actions of the crew and mans the tiller. The middle crew balances the boat (aka “sack of potatoes”) on the windward (upwind) leg and acts as spinnaker trimmer on the leeward leg. The forward crew trims the jib and manages the spinnaker pole.
Today, the winds were fairly strong (more…)