Hi All,
Happy 2003. I've been back from beautiful southern New Zealand for about three weeks, got over some bad jet lag and am pretty much done with my photos. Of about 1200 shots that came back with me (after the daily culling) I ended up printing about 170, and made a JPEG slideshow with 83 of those. All I can say is, now I know why movies are getting made there (besides the cheaper costs ...).
Many of the shots were made through a tour bus window, but still came out much better than I had a right to expect. They do keep their bus windows clean
. As I found out, this is prime time in NZ and 'most everything is booked, so I consider myself lucky to get what I did.
The ND behaved very well, other than the known factors. I averaged 110-120 shots per battery charge, including some reviewing and histogram checking, not great but I had three sets and never ran out. Two or three times it did the freeze, fixed by a quick dis/re-engaging of the battery pack. And the rear display is hard to see in bright daylight without shading it.
But I really enjoyed using the camera and the two lenses (24-85 and 70-300). It got fairly wet under some rain and on an run under a waterfall by the fjord boat (as did I) but did not complain as I shot and kept wiping water off.
And yes, ran into some dust spots, which seemed to come then often disappear by itself - is this thing self-cleaning? I think about 40-50 shots in all had dust spots, which were fairly readily removed with Photoshop, bless them. What I thought was going to be a catastrophy turned out a mild annoyance. I did find cleaning the sensor pretty straight-forward with the aid of my lens air-blower squeeze toy.
Post processing was mostly quick adjusts to contrast, brightness and saturation, and occasionally did some more elaborate adjustments with the tonal curves, kind of burn-in and dodge if you will. Once I removed phone / electric lines, and three-four times I removed obnoxious shadows or objects. But I did not play around with colors, or add more cows or rainbows and such
. If it's there it was there.
I sent the camera to Contax to check the freezing, but they couldn't duplicate it after several (including Blake Ziegler I am told) tried using it over several days, which doesn't surprise me as it's not a common situation. They actually gave me another set of batteries to try at my dealer's request, so now I have four sets (two 1700mah Sanyo and 2 1800mah Powerex
).
Well, overall I'm a happy c&er. Yes, I do hope they fix what's wrong, and don't sweep it under the rug, but it can and does deliver beautiful images within my modest requirements.
Sorry for the long post. Cheers,
DJ