> > I'm sorry that I have taken so long to reply and hope that the thread > has not meanwhile lost its momentum but I have not been able to spend > much time at the computer over the last few days. > It can always be picked up.
> As for menus, your description of the Coolpix 8400's controls is quite > illuminating and encouraging. It does sound very good. As you say it > will be interesting to see what Nikon come up with if it uses the new > Sony APS size chip. I can see definite advantages for the "Bridge > Camera" type but I do not so far like electronic viewfinders. An > optical finder is so much brighter and clearer and for general use, > composing at eye level is to me more satisfactory. It gives you the > impression of a much larger canvass showing more detail.
Any time one moves from one type of camera to another, there is a period of adjustment. Going from a rangefinder where you are accustomed to looking through a bright window with a superb focusing mechanism and instant response, to a large-format field camera with a dim image upside down on grainy ground glass is not an intuitive transition. It is like a guitar player adding a mandolin - all the notes are in the wrong places - and it takes work to come to terms with it. You just don't buy a mandolin the afternoon of a gig and expect to play it any more than you would buy a CP8400 on the morning of a shoot.
In fact, SLR optical finders tend to be rather dark in comparison, specially with the slow zoom lenses that are now common. I shot with lenses in the f-1.2 to f-2.0 range mostly because the very fast lenses gave a level of illumination in the finder with which I could work. Now with budget lenses being f-3.5 to f-5.6 or even slower at the tele end, the view is dark indeed. I don't know of any zoom faster than f-2.8 at the moment. If they do exist, they are certainly rare and expensive.
Shooting in the very low light that I love, the screen is far more brilliant than the environment, due to its electronic nature. It &lifies the light. I see more with the monitor than I do with my bare eye! It is brighter. The CP8400 extends the view to several -EV beyond the previous CP5k. In a room dark enough to require a four second exposure at f-2.6, ISO50, the room appears brilliantly lit on the screen. Even at -1.0EV beyond that - eight second exposure - the screen has begun to dim, but is still quite usable.
I have no problem using the monitor in sunlight either. Of course, if I was willing to put the camera up to my face, I also have the EVF - the electronic view finder - which is both bright and completely shaded by its housing. I may use it on occasion if I need to totally reconfigure the camera in bright sunlight. A little easier if one is doing a lot of menu browsing. However, this is rare.
I do have a friend who uses his EVF on pretty much every shot and loves it with his CP8800, a sister camera. It has an eye adjustment, so the view is very sharp and clear even without glasses. However, I am tired of having a camera jammed into my face, and the monitor represents libertation for me.
A lack of finder detail never bothered me. I NEVER dwell in the viewfinder of any camera. The picture is composed before I even look into the camera, and the viewfinder is simply there to confirm that the camera agrees with what I see. This is true whether I am shooting SLR, rangefinder, view camera or mirrorless digital camera, in studio or on location. With a manual camera, the screen is used for focusing and framing, but it is the bare eye that sees the detail. The ground-glass, viewfinder window or monitor only confirms.
Dwelling in the viewfinder is the mark of the novice. I recall seeing so many tourists photographing their families while zooming in and out, squinting into their SLRs with one eye tightly shut, all the while the tension meter is going off the top of the scale in everyone in the shot. Working shooters barely glance into their cameras. They are looking for the next shot while getting the present one.
This is specially true of sports shooters. I followed a colleague as lead sports shooter on the newspaper, after he ignored this rule. He was photographing a college football match, dwelling in the viewfinder, using the zoom to frame the action. He completely lost track of the distance to the players until four very large armour-clad young men landed on top of him. He was in hospital for weeks with broken bones and internal injuries. Reality became the little movie the zoom lens was projecting on the glass in the camera, and he had no idea how close the players were until they flattened him.
I did a lot of auto-race coverage at super-speedways in the USA. Sometime about 2/3 of the way through a race there is invariably a car that blows a tire or gets tapped, goes sideways and sends half of the field or more into smokey swirling chaos - offering the fans a thrill and the shooters, great pictures. Working with a 200mm to 300mm lens, your view is narrow. Dwell in the viewfinder and you miss most of the spectacular shots. The wreck spreads over a large area. With manual cameras, you are focused on where it will happen, then it is a matter of seeing the trajectories of the race cars, and framing the spots where they will come together. You MUST work with both eyes.
A portrait studio photographer may only look into the camera at the beginning of the shoot, and then again if the setup is changed. A landscape or architectural shooter with a field camera would never dwell on the ground-glass, because it is so difficult to see. Use a magnifier for critical focus, stop the lens down and close the shutter then wait for the cloud to drift into place. Once the shutter is closed and the film holder inserted, there is NO WAY to see through the camera. View cameras have no view finders!
To move to the next level of photography, learn to use BOTH eyes, and use the finder - whatever variety - as little as possible.
> The new Nikon D200 sounds as though it will be a very interesting > camera but no screen for live previews or to fold out for candids, of > course.
And of course, it shares the curse of all dSLRs - dust. Any microscopic bit that lands on the sensor will be embedded in every image until it is delicately removed. When seen on an 8x10 print, it is anything but microscopic. Of course, dust can be avoided by never changing the lens, but that is really the only advantage of a dSLR. Dust is one of the big reasons why I prefer a sealed camera with a built-in lens and components to change the range. With a 35mm SLR, one does get dust on the occasional frame, but when the film advances, the dust is carried with it.
The built-in 24mm->85mm lens uses ED glass and is very sharp and crisp, and covers the range of the classic photojournalist kit and beyond (28mm or 35mm, 50mm and 85-90mm). One component gives me a range of 18mm->64mm, which I find quite ideal for perhaps 75% of all my shooting. Image quality is not visibly degraded by mounting this component. I have a second that gives me 140mm->170mm a medium long telephoto and a third that gives me 255mm, which I rarely use.
There is also a fisheye available which can be either a full-frame fisheye or the classic circular fisheye image. In the past it was of no consequence to my work, but now I am spending more time at virtual photography - 3-D modeling and rendering - than actual photography, and the program will use fisheye shots for image-based lighting. One can capture the ambient light of any actual environment and bring it into the program to light the scene that you have created there. It will also make use of the extreme dynamic range HDR files that the current version of Photoshop introduced. At this point, I am more involved in cartoonish stuff than precise realism, but should I want to go super-realistic, then the fisheye would be invaluable.
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