Be Excellent To Each Other

Though misleadingly full of old references.

Jon got a Nikon D200... mmm there's a camera I could go bisexual for.

Glass Museum- tell us more about this cool Vivitar thinger, and particularly more if it's cheaper than a Lomo. I get the feeling the internet-cool-lomo-meme might push prices up. Can you even get new 120 film any more or is it all old stock? Is it a pain to get someone to process it?

I just got one of these. It's proper lovely.

I really keep umming and ahhing about that lens.

Everything I've read says it's super..but! I keep seeing those shiny white ones like the 70-200 f/4IS and then thinking maybe I should use the Sigma 70-300 I actually have more before splashing out.

It does look like a lovely lens, though.

I have a ton of 120 film... it's a pain to process and scan in though, especially if you accidentally overexpose/underexpose it all, like I usually do.

I am camera-doom though.

I had a Lomo LC-A, and it broke. I replaced it with an Olympus XA... and it broke. So I went digital and got a lovely Canon Ixus... and dropped it in a glass of wine, thus breaking it (on the second day I used it).

Stupid cameras.

The IS is incredible. I have sharp images from handholding it on 1/10s, which is just unreal.

Mrs A is big into her photos, as is an ex-girlfriend I have who, last time we spoke (about 2 years ago) was working at a large photo library place making oodles of money with her photos of me.

I love the idea of IS, I just dunno if it would be much use for motorsports, which is what I keep telling myself I will be using a telephoto zoom for, besides ducks.

It has a setting which allows you to specify which direction of motion to suppress - so it will suppress all shakes except in the direction you are moving the camera, which I imagine is what you'd want for motorsport.

True, but for motorsports I would need a fixed shutter speed (either 1/125 or 1/250) anyway so being able to go to 1/10 etc wouldn't help?

I dunno

I've had an idea* which will hopefully help me and others actually go out and take some photos but also stop this thread going endlessly on about lenses.

Basically someone chooses a topic/title/whatever and we set a time limit (a few weeks maybe) and we summit a picture that reflects said topic/title/whatever and we can then all feel smug.

Maybe this would be better in a BETEO flickr group but I think posting pictures in a thread here would encourage more people to go out and take pictures, which of course will make the world a better place as well as adding to our smugness.

*stolen from everywhere else

MR I LIKE THAT IDEA VERY MUCH FACE

Sounds good to me. Can the first category be me?

Or babies MR WINKY FACE

I agree with this, and should I find a camera that can last me longer than a few days I will participate.

It's a sad, sad world when your most reliable camera is bundled in to your phone.

Grim..., can you do a random user generator? We could have a random user pick themes.

I can.
Give me three minutes...

I'm tempted to register as "Random User", now.

Hahaha - first person chosen was AceAceBaby!

Someone PM him - I'm off to lunch.

OOoohhhhh *hugs Mr Bluecup for such a fun idea*

Are you sure ti works and isn't just picking the first person in the members list?

Grim... equates 'random' with 'alphabetised'.

*Bluecup is really smug at idea being accepted*

I've moved the photography subject into a new thread.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=161

I bought the Fuji A820 recently for £70. 8mpix.

This is something small and compact I can take on holiday that saves me lugging about my infinitely superior S7000 . Sadly I'm not overly impressed with the 820. The LCD is very grainy, the video only takes at 320x240 which makes it rather worthless, and I'm not overly blown away with the picture quality. Suffers badly in poor light, which is always upsetting. Bafflingly it appears to have a seperate 'Red Eye Reduction' mode on the function dial. From what I can tell all this does is enable the standard double-flash, and is a feature that is available simply by changing the flash while in auto mode.

It seems odd that this has been 'hard' programmed into the camera by way of its own spot on the functions dial. There's also an 'anti shake' mode which again does fuck all in low light conditions. By low light I mean standard, indoors with the lights on. I haven't met a camera that copes well with this. When I try to be clever with the exposure and whatnot, I either get a bright, blurry picture, or a sharp, so-dark-I-can't-see shot.

I am the suck at taking pictures.

An 8mp compact camera is more than likely to take shitty quality pictures by default, the more megapixels there are the more cluttered the sensor's gonna be and if the sensor isn't really big enough to hold all of the photosensors then light's gonna bleed over to others and fuck the photo up.

I understand Ace, it's why I wasn't overly surprised, as I've never spent enough to get truly magnifico results at low-light.

My dad has, though, his recent shame was laying out £700 on a lens which he hid from my mum for quite some time

Yeah.

That said, my Ixus 70 is a thing of beauty for a similar price Com paid. It does very nice 640x480 video and 7.1 megapixel and is more than good enough for my cack hands.

I must admit, for a quite simple camera, I my Ixus 750.

Bought one last year for £380, no lens, and that was a re-furb..
I used the lens off my old Canon film SLR but I'm noticing how poor it is, given the high res-ness of the photos. Maybe I'll pick up the kit lens off ebay, see if that's better.

Ta..

It's a bit annoying that the more I spend on cameras, the worse photos I get out of it. I took some truly amazing pictures with my old compact *1.3 Megapixel* Olympus 960Z (it could even take good photos through a pair of binoculars!), but with the SLR I'm always noticing faults and it often gets the metering wrong. Plus the file sizes are 8 times bigger so my HD is filling up at a stupid rate
And it's big and heavy. Maybe I'm more temperamentally suited to a compact, after all..

Indeed you can. It's a little bit plasticky, but for the price it's an incredibly good lens. It's the lens I use second most often, after my macro.

Hey Curiosity, what exactly is the problem with the Lomo?

The windy-on mechanism is jammed. Pretty simple to fix, I'd imagine, but the camera place i went to wanted to charge 95 quid to fix it. I could get a new (well, not new, but...) frikkin' Lomo for that!

The XA has a similar problem, where the button you press down to release the windy-on mechanism has jammed in some way that I forget, so I can't wind on, or I can't open the camera or something else that's probably quite simple to fix.

*shrugs*

Most cameras I own break fairly soon after I get the, which is a shame, as I was learning to get decent focus with the Lomo and was having fun cross processing.

What I'd do is just keep pressing the shutter release lightly and pushing whatever parts of the shutter curtain I could find over and over again. My Carena eventually yielded and returned to normal after I reminded it of how it was supposed to work. (It was broken when it was given to me, I swear!)

Don't do that though.