April 2013 - Digital Group - New Camera Setup

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

April 2013 - Digital Group - New Camera Setup

Post by spb » Sat Apr 06, 2013 11:23 am

It was good to see the Small Barn Hall jam-packed for this month's meeting.

NEWS
Nik plug-ins have a reputation for excellence but at high cost, and I mentioned at the last meeting that they had been taken over by Google and it would be interesting to see that would happen to their premium pricing model. Well, now we know - the entire bundle of six products - The Nik Collection - has now been slashed to £98. This includes the highly regarded Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro. The latter was previously £133 alone.

It gets better - if you bought any individual Nik products within the last five years you can get the entire bundle free and if you spent more than £98 on Nik products since 22/2/13 you can get a refund of the difference. And it gets better still - discount codes such as hdrsoftware15 will discount another 15% bringing the price of the bundle down to £83 inc VAT!

The rapid downward move of software pricing is most welcome and only the professional Adobe products seem immune to this trend with CS6 remaining stubbornly above £600 (unless you can get the educational discount).

The disk drive in the club laptop failed recently and it was interesting to find statistics from Google from 2007 about the reliability of 100,000 of the ordinary consumer-grade disks that they use. In summary, each hard disk had a 2% chance of failure in the first year and around 8% in years 2 to 5, increasing thereafter. I own several hard disks and this is roughly in line with my own experience of a hard disk failure every 3 to 5 years. In theory SMART monitoring software should warn us of impending failure but it has never warned me and Google concluded that the technology is almost useless.

So - backup, backup, backup! Personally I like simple backups that I can control and understand. I put all of my important data in a very small number of folders and synchronise these with an external HDD periodically using SyncBack Free. For added convenience in the event of a C: failure I make an occasional image of the entire disk. This is very easy with Windows 7 or 8. Here's a video of the simple procedure. It is said that a backup is not a backup until you have successfully recovered using it and (touch wood) these have always worked for me when I needed them.

NEW CAMERA SETUP
Having just bought a new camera (Nikon D7100) I thought that it would be instructive to cover some questions that quickly arise;

- Supplied Software. According to Which? 60% of new camera purchasers install the software that comes in the box - many thinking that they need to. In fact, this is not necessary and Which? found much of it to be of dubious value. Only Samsung software came out well in the tests and Sony software was particularly poor. Canon, Nikon, Panasonic etc were mediocre. They found Photoshop Elements 11 to be the best, followed by a web-based editor Pixlr and Aperture for the Mac. The only situation in which you might have to load the supplied software is if you intend to take raw images and your preferred image software does not support your camera's raw files.

- Firmware. Digital cameras contain software and this may be updated occasionally by the manufacturer. Downloading and installing this 'firmware' is very easy and may fix problems or add features so it's often worthwhile doing. However if it does go wrong, the only fix may be a visit to the service centre so I would not recommend updating firmware just before an important photographic trip. Check the manufacturer's website for the latest news on updates.

- Memory Cards. See my notes from December 2012.

- Raw vs JPG. This is an important decision. See my notes from January 2012.

- Camera Settings. There are hundreds of settings on a modern camera but thankfully most can be left on the factory defaults. Taking the Nikon D7000 as an example, Ken Rockwell's website includes a very useful analysis of the most important settings that should perhaps be changed from the defaults. Most usefully he outlines his philosophy for using the two banks of user settings that can be saved as U1 and U2 for instant recall. He uses them for Landscapes and Snaps. I use mine for Images With Potential (Raw) and Snaps. Another useful observation is that we should not stick blindly to outmoded techniques (centre weighted metering, spot focussing) if modern innovations (AF-Auto and AF-Area Auto, Matrix Metering) now actually work better.

Perhaps controversially, Ken Rockwell advocates the smallest Raw format; 12-bit lossy compressed, rather than 14-bit lossless as he claims that he can't see any difference and the image file size is dramatically reduced with all of the inherent benefits that brings. He also suggests that the camera need not be switched on and off during the day - it uses little power if left on - although you should turn it off when changing lenses.

- Accessories. Apart from lenses, what else might a new camera need? I always fit a UV filter to protect the front element and wide angle lenses will be less likely to suffer vignetting with a thin 'pro' filter. Other useful filters can be a polariser (circular type), neutral density filter and graduated filter (esp for landscapes). Some cameras offer a wireless remote control accessory that I have found to be very useful, as is a spare battery. A softer neoprene strap can be much more comfortable than the supplied strap for heavy cameras. Finally the screen(s) will benefit from protection from clear plastic film available in any phone shop.

AUDIO-VISUAL SOFTWARE
Most image-orientated software can produce simple slideshows but software to produce sophisticated audio-visual shows is harder to find. Two products have become the market leaders over recent years;

PicturesToExe (Wnsoft £50).
PicturesToExe (PTE) virtually invented the genre and has a loyal base of fans, especially amongst competitive AV-makers. Amersham PS obtained a club licence for PTE many years ago but I have recently had reports that WnSoft are no longer honouring their lifetime free updates policy for club licenses. However they are offering 30% discount upon application which would bring the price down to a reasonable £33.

ProShow Gold/Proshow Producer (Photodex £46/£160)
ProShow software is capable of producing equally sophisticated shows to PTE with the added facility of hundreds of optional pre-canned styles. Whilst many of these are rather kitsch they do offer the ability to produce very complex shows very easily. Gold would be sufficient for beginners but Producer adds extra control if you find yourself being limited in some areas eg control over transparency. A loyalty scheme offers 33% and 50% discount on the upgrade from Gold to Producer after 12 or 24 months respectively.

So which should you choose? Both have a passionately loyal user base, very active support forums and much to recommend them. I started with PTE but migrated to Gold and now, Producer. Arguably, the user interface of PTE is less intuitive but users report that the image quality of the output is superior although I believe that this is due to some poor default settings in Proshow. My recommendation would be Proshow Gold but you can download free trials of both and see what appeals most to you.

We have had several APS Digital Group evenings dedicated to audio-visuals but they have only generated a short burst of enthusiasm which has not been sustained. Only Paul Keene and I seem to have maintained a strong interest. If you do get the AV bug it can be all-consuming and the ability to mix visual and aural material can produce very powerful experiences that are as addictive as drugs!

Many shows created by PTE can be downloaded here and some Proshow shows can be found here.

NEXT MEETING
The final meeting of the season will be on Thursday 2nd May when Peter Jones will hopefully cover his long-awaited talk on Lightroom supplemented by David Baldock - a keen advocate.

Cheers, Steve

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