Back To Fuji (F810)

It’s been some time since I posted here. My excuse is work, work, and unfortunately no time to take pictures. No time to take good pictures, I mean, because I work in a kindergarten now, and we HAVE to take pictures every day, loads of them, to send them to the parents. And once the work is over I am so tired, that the world is simply not beautiful enough to tempt me to take a picture. Sigh.

Then the Chinese New Year holiday came, and things changed.

I dusted off my cameras, (nikon D40 and Fuji), charged my beloved fuji F810 and found out that the flash problem didn’t go away on its own as I has secretly expected. The camera somehow thinks that flash is always on, and tries to take pictures with it, closed or not. The result is underexposed images with the flash closed and a battery that runs out in the matter of hours. The only work around is in landscape mode.

So I opened the Chinese shopping sites, and on Taobao found another second-hand F810, and promptly bought it.

I doesn’t have a flash problem so far, or any other problem, and little by little the world regained its beauty.

Why I keep coming back to this discontinued camera? After all it came out in 2004, that is six

years ago.

Because it delivers amazing pictures for its size.

Before, cameras used to write images on light-sensitive emulsion, placed on film. Now cameras use sensors, a lot smaller than a film negative. There are advantages to this, as cameras get to be lighter and smaller and thinner. The disadvantages are loss of picture quality. A problem with most digital cameras is enlarging the pictures. When you do that you’ll see smudged corners, blurred details. The bigger cameras, DSLR , professional or not, use bigger sensors.

There are many things that make up a good picture. I’ll keep it short and simple. Each digital

sensor has a lot of pixels. They are millions of pixels, and 1 000 000 pixels amount to one 1megapixel, or 1 MP.

When you put a lot of pixels on a small sensor, the pixels have to be smaller too. Smaller pixels catch less light. Light is very important when you take a picture...You realize this when you shoot indoors or in the evening. Even when your eyes tell you that the light is enough, your

camera often doesn’t think so. That’s why we have the flash, but you can’t always take pictures with a flash.

The bigger cameras, DSLR have larger pixels on a larger sensor. The pixel density with them is something like 2-5 million pixels per square centimeter. While the lighter and cuter digital cameras have between 30-45 million pixels per square centimeter. It affects the picture quality, and it’s best seen in low light conditions. The cute digital cameras have higher ISO, light sensitivity, but it brings another problem - digital noise. These are dots of color on your photographs, that simply do not belong - blue, green, purple. To deal with noise, cameras employ noise-reduction techniques, which ultimately hide these colorful dots, but smudge the

fine details in your pictures.

Now back to Fuji F810.

It’s sensor size is 1/1.7, or 0.43 square centimeters. That’s is not bad at all for a camera this

size. The pixel density is 14 million pixels per square centimeter. It has only 6 megapixels. It makes quite good pictures. Another thing that drew me to it, is its ability to save images in RAW. Most point-and-shoot cameras deal only with JPG pictures. They are fine, but what the camera does is to take all the control from you, process the sensor data, adjust levels, colors and white balance, and compress the image to a ready to use JPG file.

If you want to keep that creative control, you need to take pictures in RAW format, and then process them with Photoshop or another program that deals with them. Many people don’t bother and are perfectly happy with the JPG output. I, however, want to experiment with my pictures. I want to see if I can bring up a picture shot in the evening, if I can brighten up a portrait taken at home, not close to a lamp or a window.

Of course, i can do all this with my Nikon D40, that’s why I got it. It has a larger sensor and pixel density of 1.6 million pixels per square centimeter. But my Nikon is larger, heavier,

impossible to carry in a pocket, to hang from my wrist, and definitely attracts attention

whenever I point it at somebody. While candid pictures, or street pictures are not even noticed if I am brandishing a little silver camera taken out of my pocket.

Because in the case of Fuji F810 appearances deceive. It can save images in RAW format, and later, in the comfort of my own home and Photoshop I can make them appear the way I saw them.

Our eyes and brain are the best camera. They adjust quickly to light, and compile an unforgettable image in our memories.

How many times you have you taken a picture of an amazing scenery, only to arrive home and find out that the image is not what you saw? The greens don’t shine the way you remember

them, the colors of the sunset are washed out, and the sun reflection on our friends hair is just a white blotch? If I save the pictures in RAW I try to process them to get the image I saw. The

image that inspired me to press the shutter.

So there it is, my reason to hunt down and get another second-hand Fuji F810. Because they

just don’t make them like this anymore. Its tiny silver metallic body hides the fact that this camera has a low pixel density on a relatively large sensor, it produces low noise pictures, it is able to save them in RAW format, it has very sharp and clear lens. It has full manual controls, which means that I can adjust the speed, the aperture (opening), the light sensitivity (ISO). And it fits comfortably in my pocket.

Here are four images taken with it, to illustrate what I mean by good pictures.

Posted on www.silviamyworld.blogspot.com