Archive for December 11th, 2007
Canon G9 update
I took Zosia for a ride on her bike in the local park at the weekend. Despite all the greyness that has abounded in recent weeks, there was a certain something in the light at times that was worth capturing. These evening sky shots have, I think, been captured quite well by the G9. (click on picture for bigger size)
What you need to understand though, is that these are all after some processing in the computer with Photoshop CS2. The results straight out of the camera are often disappointing. For example this shot, not one I like but used as an example. Here is the shot exactly as it came out of the camera:
As you can see it is washed out. The sky has been pretty much lost completely for the sake of keeping the rest of the shot under control. This was at ISO 200, the camera was on auto ISO and “programme” shooting mode so it is a fair reflection of what would have been obtained in full automatic mode by most casual snappers. After some processing it looks like this:
This is better, closer to what I saw, but still not good enough for me. It has rendered the red of the chimney in the background particularly badly. I had to adjust levels because this camera seems to always overexpose mixed scenes with sky. I also removed noise, sharpened and saturated. If you point just at the sky, or alternatively exclude as much sky as possible, it exposes quite well but any mixed scene where the sky is brighter than the rest is it quite horrid. Be interesting to see how it does in the summer when everything is bright.
I also took a few shots of the evening light falling onto trees in the park or general park scenes with dappled light. It handled these just a badly as the shot above. In real life the scenes were not exactly spectacular but they were ‘nice’. The G9 removed anything nice about the scene and just gave a bland snap, it really is not good with the subtleties of light. I didn’t have my Fuji with me to get a comparison but I know for sure the D70 would have given far better results than this.
Having said this. There are many more controls than I am using yet and, as usual, I’m not standing there and taking a few shots to see what works best. I’m sure there will be a way to improve the results, I just have not found it yet and it’s certainly not “automatic”. Setting it to underexpose would be the first thing to do, I’ll try that out next time.
More later, G9 fans! 
