Family, Photography and other misc news
At the weekend I grabbed my Nikon V1 a small Compact System Camera rather then my Leica.
Choosing a camera is very personal and today I thought I wanted effortless, autofocus and zoom lens, the lot. Makes life easier when walking the dog.
Generally though if I am grabbing a camera its the Leica M and its tiny jewel like lens I go for.
This Saturday we decided to have a family stroll through Whisby Nature Reserve. Normally a trip to Whisby Nature Reserve entails a boot full of Nikon DSLR’s, long fast and heavy glass plus a heavy tripod.
Not exactly a fun walk and we normally stop at a hide and set up for a few hours of bird photography.
This time however the purpose was a fun and enjoyable dog walk.
If recent form is any guide you would think I would be grabbing the Leica but this time I decided to use the Nikon V1 and a standard zoom. A small quick autofocusing camera which can produce good results is what I was after.
The Nikon V1 produces great results and it was the first mirror less design to offer decent autofocus with dedicated focus points on sensor. The current V3 has some nice features as well but I have yet to see a compelling reason to upgrade over the V1, as the V3 has some of the same issues I have with the V1 and the EVF is optional.
Now Nikon have a number of DL series compacts with the same CX large sensor and with full compatibity with the Nikon Speedlite system, which is what some Nikon Series 1 users have hoped for. They can also use an optional EVF.
Its seems Nikon’s compact devision have produced a better competitor and now there is even less reason to invest in the Nikon Series 1 system.
While the current top of the range model V series the V3 is good I see no reason to buy it over the DL range of compacts with their better lens and Speedlite compatibility. If your really set on interchangeable lens in a mirrorless system then while as a Nikon user I hate to say it the Sony, Fuji, Panasonic or Olympus are a better choice.
So we have this new device, what can I do with it. Well a quick walk through the local countryside with our hound Timmy seemed in order.
I took the Leica and shot RAW DNG only. Then at the end of the walk I grabbed my iPad and Lightening SD reader and set to work. A quick edit gave me the image above. On checking Lightroom on the desktop the edited image was also there on my external Lightroom catalogue.
Its been a little late arriving but the Apple iPad keyboard arrived today. Most of whats been posted about it is correct, there are better keyboards, but this one is slim and works with the new connector. iOS did introduce some additional features for keyboard support and sometimes a keyboard is very useful, a number of this weeks posts were written in the pub on the new iPad Pro with keyboard.
The biggest issue I have is navigation when your outside of the applications, while you can app switch with the traditional Cmd-Tab combination and go to your iOS home screen with Cmd-H it needs more commands to navigate and sometimes your are forced to use the touch screen.
It many ways its the reverse of the issue that the Microsoft Surface has, which for some things forces you back to a keyboard. Both devices have their pluses and both their negatives.
I’ll apologize now for the iPad posts this week but that’s all your likely to get.
I like drawing even though I am not a great drawer so it’s been fun trying out the pencil. It’s a very clever device and very much like using a real pencil, allowing you to hold it on the side and shade, and control the flow with how hard you press. The next step will be using it and the Adobe Apps to edit photographs.
The new iPad Pro 9.7 has arrived and I have to admit that I am enjoying it and do not regret it in the least.
I’m still working on my editing work flow and need a image resizing tool for posting but this post was all produced, including the image processing from my Nikon V1 on my new iPad.
My web content management software crashes and fails to handle large jpegs so while writing this post in the local pub, once I had edited the above image I had to downsize it. As I do not currently software to downsize images I cheated and used the pub’s wifi to email me a version of the image. The iPad’s mail client has the ability to resize when you send the image, so that’s how I resized it
It’s the first of April today and the April fool jokes are coming thick and fast. The funniest I saw today was some quick release chinos, don’t ask but very funny.
No one is claiming 1000 megapixels phone cameras yet but soon I expect that claims like this will not be April fool jokes.
I have cameras from 10 MP full frame to 36 MP full frame and medium format large format and while more megapixels can bring advantages I would personally prefer quality low noise pixels to just lots of pixels. It’s also quicker to edit and less of a hit on the disk space.