[pct-l] photography on pct.

[edmond at mydogmeg.net (Edmond Meinfelder)]

At 04:14 PM 11/6/2003 -0800, David Tibor wrote:
>i'm completely sold on digital photography.  fast,

I am too, but digital photography has some drawbacks. I enjoy portrait 
photography and consumer grade digitals cameras royally suck at capturing 
spontaneous moments. They take too long between the moment when you press 
the button to the time when the image is recorded.

Also, many consumer grade digital cameras use a freely available JPEG codec 
which has a bug causing the compression code to go into an infinite loop on 
specific inputs. My old Kodak did 1 out of a 100 times and my Olympus does 
it 1 out of a 1000 times. In Portland, I snapped a few shots of other 
hikers in the REI and the loop bug cropped up. After resetting the camera, 
I lost all the index information on the memory card. I lost 40% of my 
Oregon pictures and recovering the remaining 60% was not easy.

Another negative is this year's consumer quality digital cameras all have 
unique and expensive rechargeable batteries. Meaning you have to drift a 
charger. I'd rather have my Olympus which can take either AA's or a CRV3 (a 
disposable lithium battery). I get CRV3's where I can (supermarkets) and 
AA's everywhere else. It's a shame as I'd love to get the latest Cannon 
Powershot with it's ability to stitch images together for amazing landscape 
shots.

A plus not mentioned is with digital photography, you can become a better 
photographer as you go, by seeing the results on the digital LCD. This 
encourages more experimentation and results in interesting shots. I ended 
up playing a lot with silhouettes.

Tangent