October 2013 - Digital Group - Equipment

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
Post Reply
spb
Posts: 146
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

October 2013 - Digital Group - Equipment

Post by spb » Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:56 pm

A warm welcome to the many new members and potential members at this first meeting of the 2013-14 season.

NEWS

Although Focus on Imaging has ceased, the Future group will be replacing this annual photographic show at the NEC with a new show scheduled for 1-4 March 2014.

Flickr has revamped it's site and is now offering 1TB of free online storage, although this will include ads and some restrictions which can be removed by payment of a fee.

The Adobe decision to cease perpetual licences for Photoshop CS and replace them with a monthly subscription has upset a lot of people and in response, they have announced a package for photographers consisting of Photoshop Creative Cloud, Lightroom and more for £8.78 per month. This price is only until the end of 2013 and you must already have CS3 or later. Photoshop Elements and Lightroom will continue to be available with perpetual licences as before. The options for amateur photographers are analysed in more detail here.

dpReview have made an interesting comparison of rugged waterproof compact cameras here. They may not produce the finest image quality but they remove the risk of damage on activity holidays and I have been using one very successfully for a couple of years for biking and watersports.

Japanese camera manufacturers shipped 43% less cameras in the first half of 2013 than in the same period on 2012. This is largely due to a drop in mass-market point-and-shoot models presumably in favour of camera-phones. DSLRs and Interchangeable Lens Compacts dropped by 18%.

The trend to fix shortcomings in sensors and lenses by software is being taken to it's ultimate conclusion by a project at the University of British Columbia where they are working on software to correct the major flaws in a single-element lens. Whilst this is not going to be seen in products very soon (except maybe camera-phones), the trend is clear.

Microsoft have acquired the Nokia smartphone business so we can expect to see a lot of cash being injected into that area.

EQUIPMENT FOR DIGITAL IMAGING

Here is a brief description of the basic equipment needed;

Camera - all modern digital cameras from reputable brands are capable of producing acceptable images in good light. The critical factors are the sensor size and pixel count. A full-size A3 top-quality print requires no more than 8Mpx - including some margin for cropping, so pixel counts of 16, 20 or more Mpx are not essential. Indeed with the small sensors in most compact cameras and camera-phones, too many pixels crammed into a tiny sensor creates noise and poor quality when taking pictures in low light.

Lenses - a fixed focal length lens or a zoom of no more than 3x or 4x will produce the best quality. Even very expensive super-zoom lenses from the big names can produce surprisingly poor quality results, with distortions and aberrations, especially around the edges.

Memory Cards - buy several, they're cheap. Class 10 (or 66x) memory cards from the big names; Lexar, SanDisk, Kingston, Integral are good choices. Faster cards are expensive and the speed is only evident when shooting a burst of many raw images in quick succession, which few of us will do. Always format the card in the camera before re-using it.

Computer - any PC or laptop these days is capable of processing digital images, excepting netbooks. Apple Macs are equally good but ensure that you have people that you can turn to for support as most of us use PCs. I would not recommend an iPad for serious imaging - the software is fundamentally lacking - although it is excellent for showing a portfolio. Install at least 2GB memory, preferably much more for good responsiveness.

Storage - conventional spinning HDDs are cheap as chips - buy a couple of 500GB or bigger. However, bear in mind that they have a limited life of 3 to 5 years on average. Also consider a Solid State Disk SSD for your boot disk containing only your software applications, maybe 128GB. This will speed up any computer by a huge factor, especially at start-up.

Monitors - buy a good quality branded monitor - it is the window on your images. IPS technology is best. Eizo is the choice of the professionals but Dell, Apple, Viewsonic, NEC, Asus and Samsung are all excellent amongst others. Screens on laptops are usually poor so it would be wise to buy an external one.

Printers - A4, A3 or A3+ printers marked 'Photo' will have the important extra ink colours beyond the basic three and black. Look for 6 or more inks. Epson have traditionally been favoured by members but Canon and HP are very well reviewed as well. Dye ink printers are cheaper and are perfectly acceptable but the pigment-ink printers have fade-proof inks and can be more naturalistic. The latter should be chosen if there is any intention to sell your photos. Printers with additional grey inks are recommended for monochrome printing. Use the printer manufacturer's ink and paper initially to minimise colour management issues.

Editing Software - For those who need the capability to make composites, be creative, or do detailed image adjustments, Photoshop Elements 10, 11 or 12 is highly recommended. For those who largely take their images 'in camera' Adobe Lightroom 3, 4 or 5 is highly recommended. The latest versions are only necessary to handle Raw files from new cameras. Many other image editors exist but members will not then benefit from the club's shared experience and tuition.

Viewing & Organising Software - Sophisticated database/organisers such as the Elements Organizer, Picasa or Lightroom provide the capability to compare, select, keyword and present their images but require a high level of commitment. Simple free viewers such as Faststone or XnView and Adobe Bridge, allow a more casual browsing approach which can be combined with a simple program-independent folder-based filing system.

Finally - don't forget that all screens need calibrating with the club's ColorMunki. Anti-virus software such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG is not an option, and backups to an external HDD are vital to avoid total loss of your precious images and documents. The HDD should be kept separately from the PC, preferably off-site or hidden. An image of the boot disk will save a huge amount of time re-loading and re-configuring all of your applications when the boot disk dies. This is easily achieved via Backup and Restore in Win 7 and also (apparently slightly more hidden) in Win 8.

All of these topics have been covered in more detail in the past - see the notes of previous meetings on this forum.

RAW IMAGE FILES

This topic was covered in detail by us in January 2012. See the notes here.

NEXT MEETING

Thursday 7th November 2013

Cheers, Steve Brabner

Post Reply