Musings on Photography

Just a few random thoughts to satisfy the curiosity of those who wondered what photo gear I dragged throughout China.

The camera equipment all fit into a very small (7″ x 5″ x1.5″) soft Eagle Creek packing thingie.

Inside were:

• Canon Powershot G9 with the shoulder strap taken off and a wrist strap added.
• 4 4GB Lexar Professional 133x SDHC cards
• one Lexar USB SDHC card reader
• two NB-2LH Canon brand lithium ion batteries for the G9
• the Canon charger for the batteries
• one 250GB Western Digital Passport external USB hard disk and USB cable

In addition to this bag of photo stuff, I also had an Apple 15″ Macbook Pro and one of those plug converters to allow me to plug my gear into the various strange outlets used in China.

My practice was that at the end of each day, I’d download everything off the SDHC cards onto the laptop, duplicate it all onto the external disk, and wipe the cards. Batteries got recharged each evening, when I remembered.

The laptop and the hard disk always lived in different bags, so that if I lost one, I still had a chance at having the photos taken so far.

This setup worked very well, I was very pleased.

Above photo made using the Canon Powershot G9. (1/250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 100, although you can extract nearly no useful camera performance info from such a small version of the image)

In this post, MCD asks (about the G9): “What about the viewfinder misalignment issue?”

I haven’t found the viewfinder so much misaligned as much as just not really showing the frame boundaries. Like most pocketable digital cameras, the viewfinder is bright, looks pretty crisp (at least once I set the diopter adjustment it is!), but not much use for critical framing decisions. For that, use the back display.

This is something of a disappointment, I admit. I was hoping that I’d find the G9 to be a sort of drop-in digital replacement for my old travel camera friend, my trusty Contax T3, but with a zoom added. It’s not - it needs its own special adjustment on the part of the photographer.

One misfeature of the G9 that frustrated me constantly was that zoom, in fact. It’s a power zoom - there’s a little rocker switch that surrounds the shutter button, and you push it one way to zoom in, and another way to zoom out. There’s so much to hate about power zooms on compact digital cameras:

• They’re not really zooms so much as they’re multiple focal lengths - that is, you can’t actually select from an infinite span of focal lengths - there are some number of settings, and you can’t get between two adjacent ones.
• The zoom rate is fixed
• Every time you turn the camera off, the focal length resets to the widest setting.