Enova HD digital camcorder

I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the video produced by a digital camcorder costing well under £100. Although these low end camcorders can look like a bit of a toy, this device is incredibly well made - it feels very solid.

Like many of the other digital camcorders it has a "flick out" USB port that makes connecting the device to a laptop an absolute breeze. The camcorder appears as a mass storage device and files can be uploaded by dragging and dropping them onto the laptop.

I like the fact that the device uses rechargeable AA batteries. The batteries and the charger are included. These means that the batteries will be cheap and easy to replace and if they run flat while you are away from home, you could use disposable batteries as an alternative.

The downsides:

• The interface is not as simple to use as similar devices. The Flip is easy to use and it is surprising that such a simple hardware UI could be made this confusing. The UI to the Flip is much simpler and easy to use;


• To compound this, the instructions are pretty minimal (a folded up piece of paper about 3 inches wide and 12 inches long). I was expecting to find detailed instructions as a PDF document on the enclosed CD. No such luck. Why didn't the manufacturer do this? It wouldn't have cost anything (other than producing the material in the first place). Failing that, why not include a URL to the instructions? No luck here either. Strange.


• The battery life is pretty poor and doesn't last more than about 30-40 minutes if you are lucky, so an 8Gb memory card probably is going to lead to a flat battery. Maybe there was a reason why the batteries are replaceable!


• I was disappointed that the recorded format is .mov. I would have preferred either .avi or .wmv. The enclosed software does allow you to edit and then transcode to the content to .avi or .wmv, but it is an additional step. Some video editing software (e.g. Pinnacle 12) won't import .mov files for editing, so watch out. More fool me, I should have checked before purchasing the device.

I would be tempted to use a Flip rather than one of these devices, but the quality of the video is pretty impressive for a digital camcorder under £100. If you are looking for an inexpensive HD video recorder, then take a look at the Flip HD. It is slightly more expensive than the Enova, but it is probably worth the extra cash (I only have the "normal" version of the Flip).

Nikon Coolpix P6000

I have been a big fan of Nikon cameras for many years - all my 35mm cameras are Nikon and my F90x and F5 are amongst my most favourite cameras. Like Nokia mobile phones, Nikon cameras are operate in a similar way - the Coolpix P6000 is no exception. This camera definitely owes much of it's heritage to the Nikon SLRs - both 35mm and digital - that have gone before it.

Form factor
It was the form of the P6000 that initially drew me to it. It has a kind of retro appearance with a large knurled knob and a hot shoe on top. Very reminiscent of my FM2 (another Nikon 35mm favourite).

If you are looking for an ultra compact digital camera, this is NOT the one for you. I have an Olympus FE-300 which I use for work. It is a 12MB compact and fits easily into my bag without me noticing it. I use it for recording whiteboards during meetings etc. For this purpose, it works really well. However, it is just too slow to use on the move (I tried, unsuccessfully, to photograph an otter swimming underwater while at the Seattle aquarium recently - the delay between the button being depressed and the shutter firing made it just about impossible). The lack of a viewfinder does not help either.

The P6000 is small enough to fit into a large pocket and has a great solid "chunky" feel to it. It feels like an F5 version of a digital compact. The body is made of magnesium alloy and is covered in part by a coarse rubber grip (which probably explains the similarity with the F5!).

The good bits
It is a well designed camera. The layout of the controls will feel familiar to a Nikon SLR user. The command wheel is used to great advantage. The layout feels as if it really has been thoroughly thought through. For example, if you are in playback mode (viewing images) and half press the shutter button, the camera flips back into camera mode. Pressing the "Delete" key immediately after taking a picture will delete it without the need to go into playback mode. Although just small touches, these do make a difference to the overall handling of the camera.

Most of the camera's settings can be set manually and there are a features that you would not expect on a compact (e.g. real curtain sync, auto bracketing, manual focus). There are even a couple of user definable user modes that can be configured.

Power up. The camera seems to power up almost immediately and, in use, there is negligible delay between depressing the button and the shutter firing.

Lens. This works really well, particularly in macro mode. It could probably do with a slightly longer focal length (x4 optical zoom), but works well as is.

Picture quality. Both picture resolution (13MB) and colour rendition is absolutely stunning (which is probably what you would expect).

Face recognition. This works well in "portrait" mode and instantly detected faces. I could even get it to recognise a face from a print on my desk. See ?????. The camera focuses on the face, even if it is off centre.

GPS. This took a while, probably 30-40 minutes, to locate the satellites once it was initially powered up. But after this, it worked well. Obviously, outdoors will produce the best results, but it still managed to find a satellite signal while sat at my desk next to the window. It seems pretty accurate. However, when moving from location to location, it can take up to 10 minutes to locate the satellites. This gets a bit annoying after a while.

All in all a great little camera. Solidly built and really easy to use.

Retouching tips in Photoshop

Came across this blog entry today which seems to cover some really useful Photoshop material, particularly for portrait work. Judging from the number of comments on the page and I am not the only one that thinks this is useful material!

The thing that I find amazing is how difficult many of these tips would be in the traditional darkroom.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/15/70-beauty-retouching-photoshop-tutorials/

More tone mapping

Just for the sheer hell of it! More tone mapping. These are shot in Osterley Park, West London earlier today. They consist of 3 images - one stop over exposed, one stop underexposed and one image correctly exposed. Shot using a Nikon D100 and auto bracketing. As you can see from the images, I only had a wide angle lens!

In terms of the settings, they are way over the top producing rather weird graphic type images. I am using Photomatix Pro 3.0 to produce these. You don't need any other software to produce these although I have resized these in Photoshop (click on any of the images to see a slightly larger version).

Tone mapping using HDR

HDR is a technique for producing a digital image with High Dynamic Range. Digital cameras unfortunately can only capture a limited range of exposures. So, if you take a picture in a room with light streaming through the windows, the camera often struggles to capture the scene outside. Here's an example I took in my living room - the image of the street outside is largely over exposed and parts of the room inside are underexposed (e.g. the shadow area of the chair in front of us). And even if we could capture such a wide dynamic range, an LCD monitor would struggle to display it!

On film, the situation is slightly different. Film has a much wider dynamic range and if I had shot the same image as above on a film camera, if we looked at the negative we would see that the details of the street outside would have been recorded as well as the details in the room (assuming I had exposed it properly!). However, photographic paper (required to make a print)- just like an LCD monitor - is not capable of displaying such a wide dynamic range. This is why traditional photographers end up dodging and burning prints in the darkroom - "burning" refers to exposing the highlights for additional amounts of time under the enlarger to bring out the details. In the example above, the details of the road outside would have been "burnt in" to have produced any detail on the print. Anyway, I have digressed, back to HDR.

HDR is a digital technique for combining images of the same scene that have different exposures in order to capture a wider dynamic range. In other words, you might take three images - one over exposed (to capture the darker areas), one under exposed (to capture the brighter areas) and a normally exposed image. Using HDR software, you can combine these images and effectively "flatten" out or compress the dynamic range. This will add detail to the darker shadows and bring out the detail in the over exposed highlights. It is a pretty handy technique and something where digital photography just beats traditional methods hands down.

Now, often when you see a HDR image, it has often been "tone mapped". Tone mapping is the process of associating a set of approximate tones with an image. Wikipedia covers the topic if you want more details. The resulting images have an almost graphic feel to them. It is possible to adjust the effects in the HDR software, so find something that you like.

Here's a test image I produced using Photomatix (you can see it is the trial version by the watermark) with three images - one exposed normally, one over exposed by 1 stop, one under exposed by 1 stop. I have made the effect pretty extreme in this example, but it is possible to turn down effects. You can download the trial software from here on the HDRsoft website. If you want to purchase a license (which allows you to produce images without the watermark), it will set you back around £50.