How to take night shot

Depending you are taking human or the night scene:

• If you are taking human: use the flash, or use the night portrait or night scene functions provided by the camera.
• If you are taking the scene: NEVER use flash, and possible with a tripod unless you have a steady hand.

Below is a trial with all different ISO setting (manually) with a automatic setting (the night scene mode) on a Canon SD870 or Ixus 860 wide angle camera. The pictures is crop in 100%.

ISO 100 to 400, the top 3 images, very low noise, but as the exposure speed is too long, so the image is blur.

ISO 800 and 1600, the bottom left 2 images, very high noise, but fast exposure speed, so the image is clear without blur.

The final one ISO 250 (seems like when you choose automatic setting on the night scene mode, the ISO is always fixed to 250), the shutter speed is just nice that all the lights are captured with very clean (no noise) image.

Compare to my previous post, http://hightechwebs.blogspot.com/2008/05/night-shot-with-canon-870-or-ixus-860.html, you got to decide to use manual or auto setting when you are going to take night images. As in cases, like in this building, the auto setting is just nice. Whereas in my previous post, http://hightechwebs.blogspot.com/2008/05/night-shot-with-canon-870-or-ixus-860.html, the auto setting gives a poorer performance.

Click here for more Night Shot tips

Night shot with Canon 870 or Ixus 860

This is the night shot with Canon 870 or Ixus 860.


The first image with ISO 800, exposure time 0.3333 sec. The second image with ISO 1600, exposure time 0.167 sec.


It can be seen that ISO 800 (the first image) has limited noise, enough detials (the human siting at the revier side). And no hand shaking, blur image or out of focus.


While the first two took with manual ISO setting. The last image is taken with the "night scene" functions. I find that it always fix the ISO to be 250.


Unfortunately, in this case, only light can be seen, and many details information are lost.


I will show more night shots in the upcoming post.


If you like to see the video taking at night, look at this post:http://hightechwebs.blogspot.com/2008/05/taking-time-lapse-movie-with-your-canon.html

Click here for more Night Shot tips

Canon SD870 or Panasonic Fx35 - Poll Results

After a month of poll, I obtain 22 votes so far.

14 favour Canon SD 870 or Ixus 860
8 favour Panasonic Fx35 or Fx36

So the winner is Canon SD 870 or Ixus 860!

This is my personal choice as well.................

Click here for more Camera review

Taking "time lapse" movie with your Canon

This is a new feature for Canon camera Poweshot SD870 IS or Ixus 806IS , "time lapse" movie, it is an interesting function that you must try it out, and for sure you will love it. I believe someone will buy this camera due to this feature.

What is time lapse movie? Basically in this mode, you can select a shooting interval of 1 or 2 sec to have a single frame shot. When play back, two hours worth recording time will be compreseed and play back in 8 minutes (if 1 sec interval) or 4 minutes (if 2 sec interval).

This is a very good example.....

But how to take a good time lapse movie.. it is not easy... look at this failure example:

So now you know that, to take time lapse movie, you must fix your camera with a tripod, you can never hold the camera when taking time lapse movie, else it will cause the blur and fainting outcome...

Also bear in mind that, sound cannot be recorded in this "time lapse" mode.


Finally, Canon 870 or 860 also offer a LP (long play) movie function when taking normal movie, it allows you double your shotting time by giving out some quality.. I will show you some example next....

Click here for more Video Recording tips

Tips on taking Panoramic Photo

Panoramic photos, or Photo Stitching is to combine several photos to become a big one...

Many cameras now provide a fuction to let you take such photo, e.g. Canon, this function is always there...

However, without the function provided by the camera, can we take panoramic photos or stich the photos on ourself? Yes... if you know how to do it...

Why we need to do it ourself when the camera has the function, this is because the camera only allows you to stich the photos in one line:

Photo1 Photo2 Photo3 Photo4 --> become a long photo

But not:

Photo1 Photo2

Photo3 Photo4

---> to become a big square or rectangular photo as follows:

So we need to DIY Panoramic Photo..

However there are some tips that you need to pay attention:
1) set your camera to manual setting, so that you can fix the aperture, shuttle speed, if not you get different lighting for different photos, and end up you get something on the left.

2) Control the overlapping portion, not too much overlapping between photos, but also not too little, if not distortion will happen as shown left.

3) Stand as far as possible from the scene.

Finally, a link where you can buy and sell your panoramic photos:

http://www.panohouse.com/index.php

N96 is it a phone or computer?

My dream phone is finally here.... Nokia N96

Why is it a dream phone.. check it out:

internal memory: 16GB
screen: 2.8"
camera: 5 mega pixel camera, carl zeiss lens, autofocus and flash
Gps and map: nokia map with GPS
TV: DVB-H live TV
Additional wireless: wifi
Dimension: 103 x 55 x 18 mm, YES only 18mm thick
Volume size: 92 cc
Weight: 125 g

Basically it is a multimedia computer with 3D stereo speaker (dont forget it has 128MB RAM and 256MB system memory), this is very powerful compared with my Intel Pentium PC 10 years ago...

Official site: http://www.nseries.com/

Nikon Coolpix S600

In the past, I only focus on Canon, Sony and Panasonic. Recently, I find that Nikon and Fuji improve a lot, and they manage to come out with great cameras that are small in size, and impressive image quality.

Today I would like to talk about Nikon Coolpix S600 http://www.nikon-coolpix.com/e/s600.html.
I need to highlight this:

- Wide angle lens 28mm
- Small in size
- ISO 3200 (this is very sensitive to light)
- Internal 45MB memory.. this is more than the 32MB SD card given by Canon..

Will talk about more at a later time...

28mm wide angle lens digital camera

With the growing importance of wide angle, more and more camera comes with wide angle...

Here I provide a list of market available 28mm wide angle lens digital camera (35mm equivalent) for your refence...

• Canon SD870 IS
• Panasonic Tz3 Tz4 Tz5
• Panasonic Lumix Fx30, Fz18
• Nikon Coolpix S600
• Fuji F480
• Casio EX-Z100
• Samsung L74W
• Ricoh Caplio R1 / RX
  

I will update the list over the time... and do let me know if I miss out any.... or anything is wrong..

I am sure the list will increasing fast

Click here for more Wide Angle review

How to select digital camera

I am sure many of us will have this questions, which camera to buy, and where to buy it?

I am going to talk about my experience in locking down my target, on how I choose the camera. Basically this is what I did:

1. Set your requirements / budget: depending on your requirements and budget, you can short list a few camera that match to your need. For example, I need a large optical zoom 10x, in this case only Panasonic Tz3, Tz4, Tz5, Canon SX100 and Sony Cybershot H3B matched to your requirement. Or I need a wide angle 25mm, in this case, only Panasonic Fx35. Or I need a wide angle 28mm, then Panasonic Tz3, Tz4, Tz5, Canon SD870 matched. You may notice that, those with similar requirements will have similar price. And almost every brand will have one or two cameras match to your requirement.


2. Do a survey on the forum, such as forums.dpreview.com, forum.digitalcamerareview.com, http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/, http://www.photo-forums.com. However becareful when they are professional review. Usualy these professional review, they do give professional measurement, but sometimes they may not say bad things about a camera. Cnet do give quite a good review as well. However, the forum will have the input from many users.
   
3. Do a check on the buyers' survey, such as amazon.com. No one can give you a better feel than those who already own it.
   
4. Do a search on blog, many bloggers like me do share our experience.
   
5. Do a search on youtube. This is a new trick that I found out recently, many users or professional reviewer do take video on the user interface, video recording function and put on youtube.. so do remember to do a search on youtube.
   
6. Go to a nearby shop, try it out yourself before you order online!!!

Next I will talk about where to buy a camera....

Zooming capability of Canon SD870 in Video Recording

This video shows the zooming capability of Canon SD870 digital camera during video recording mode. It only allows digital zoom during the recording, as you can see from this video, it zooms from 1x to 4x (digital). Unfortunately, it doesn't auto-focus during the zooming process. If you start the video recording from optical 3.8x, then you can achieve 15x zoom in total, which I will show you some video later on.

Click here for more Video Recording tips

Wide angle digital camera 28mm vs 35mm

Here we compare the Canon A510 versus Canon SD870.

Canon SD870 is a wide angle lens camera, it is 28mm wide compared with the other standard 35mm camera.

The figure on the above is shot with A510, and the same scene is shot with SD870 as shown below. The yellow box indicates the range that A510 seen.

So it is pretty obvious that SD870 has a wider range. And wide angle is a MUST............

Click here for more Wide Angle review

Canon SD870 Distortion Measurement

We present a distortion measurement of two Canon cameras.

One is the Canon Powershot A51 and another is the Canon SD870.

Both cameras are about 78cm from the photo frame. Since SD870 is a wide angle camera, it has a wider range than A510. And that is the reason on why the image of A510 appears to be larger than SD870.

We didn't process or crop the image, the only processing is to adjust the contrast, so that the shadow are removed, and the border of the photo frame can be clearly seen.

We add in yellow straight line so as to compare it with the photo frame (which should also be a straight line if no distortion).

The red arrow will point out those portions with distorion seen. If you click to enlarge the image, it can be seen that both cameras give you similar level of distortion.

The distortion measure with different standing distance will be added later on.

If any one know how to remove the distortion with some software, do let me know. Thanks

Click here for more Distortion measurement