Be Excellent To Each Other

I have a nice Fuji S7000 which has served me well but has the drawback of being rather bulky and isn't very handy on a night out. I have a couple of small cameras but they're small 1-2mpixers that take shit pictures.

So, I'm looking for a relatively cheap 'new' camera that'll do what I want. Specific needs: Powered by AA batteries, I have loads of these and I can't be arsed to fuck around with lithium ions. It must also take xD memory cards, as I have a shitload of these too and don't want to have to buy new.

Price: < £100.

Front runner so far is this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fuji-Finepix-A8 ... 796&sr=8-7

Any advances?

Fuji Finepix's are bloody wonderful.

I am generally a fan of them myself, with all of my previous cam's being Fuji.

Well, xD means you are restricted to Olympus and Fuji, so given your other constraints I can't imagine you'll have a very long shortlist.

An oxymoronically sound statement, Dr.

I'll second all that. Especially the Megapixel advice.

I'm bored of people asking how many megapixels my camera captures, then scoffing because their compact does more. Go you.

I can't really give any specific model advice though. I may have a look around during my lunchbreak though.

Go Fuji CG.

A900 is £71 here mate http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/1404899/art/fuji/finepix-a900.html

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not happy with Pixmania, they've been dodgy and useless to me in the past

Fair enough mate. Plenty of other places have them.

My Fuji Finepix F30 is an absolute cracker (getting on a bit now but still perfect for my needs)

Yeah, I'd stay away from Pixmania. The bloke who lives in the flat beneath mine bought a Fuji S5800 from Pixmania recently (or, more accurately, got his son to buy it for him as he doesn't have a computer) and the manual arrived in French.

For a 60+ year old bloke with no experience of The Digital Age, that isn't good.

I bought my camera from them. Everything was fine other than the battery charger being European, though they did provide a slightly dodgy looking adapting device (but then I dropped the camera in a glass of wine, thus rendering everything null and void).

The reviews of such things are absolutely fucking bent. There was a review in (a major computer magazine - Ed) that chose a Nikon over a Fuji because the latter had more megapixels. Despite the actual text clearly favouring the Fuji.

Fujis are bloomin' ace. My wife has gone from two Z2800s (wore one out) through a S5000, S5500 (I think) and now a S9600. Two million photos later and she's still looking at upgrading.

It's a shame when marketers start cock-waving competitions to the detriment of the actual product. They've put such a spin on it that people think Megapixels = Quality now, which just isn't the case.

But you know what people are like: they need something quantifiable to decide what's best; it's just a shame that now manufacturers are having to keep up by pushing small sensors beyond their limits just to make larger images, ignoring severe quality issues.

If you're only ever going to publish small images on the web and produce 4x6" prints (at best), what good is a 12MP sensor if it fucks you over quality-wise?

At work trying to sell people cameras I always tell them not to get the massive megapixel one, because they will have had to cut back on other parts of the camera. Somehow, even when I'm telling people to get the cheaper one, because it's actually a bit better, AND I don't work on commision they just don't believe me and buy the expensive one anyway. People are idiots.

I'm gonna get a camera for December for my wedding - the general consensus that Fuji = teh awesome makes it likely I will get on of they. Top thanks, Excellent chums!

We got a digicam for each table of our wedding and then collected them all at the end of the night (only one got stolen, surprisingly).
It was an ace idea.

[edit]I better mention before the obligatory 'ZOMG RICH!' comments that we rented them from a wedding company for the day. It wasn't that expensive (about £60 plus £30 insurance thing for the stolen one).

[edit][edit] Too slow

Which cunt did you invite that would steal a digicam?

Also, who the hell could afford to do that?

Did anybody take any pictures though?

I've heard that idea before with pretty good results. You get lots of moments captured that you just wouldn't get in formal wedding photos. How did yours work out?

Also, did you have a professional photographer, or did you rely solely on these digicams?

Also also: what a cunt. Who would steal something from a wedding?

Unless either Grim... or Mrs Grim... have some utter idiots in their family, I'd suggest it was much more likely to be an oversight. It got left in the toilets, dropped down the back of some furniture, accidentally thrown in a bin, or taken home by mistake in someone's handbag. Given the epic levels of drunkenness at most family weddings I'd say anything is possible.

I guess that could be the reason, but then what's there to get angry about? The internet is fuelled by anger and porn.

...just as Al Gore imagined it would be.

Perhaps I should start making porn movies and get my combo powerup. Not starring myself, obv, that would be hideous.

Quite well, actually. I'd say 75% of them were crap, but that still means a few hundred good pictures.


We had a friend who is a very good photographer (in fact, we had friends for everything - the only thing we got done outside of 'someone we know' was the catering, dress and insurance) did our 'proper' photo's, but with the brief "make people pose as little as possible", and they came out great.


It was possibly lost in the field we were in, or taken by accident. Otherwise, someone from the wife's family, obviously

They probably needed to sell it to pay for tv cables.

If DBSnappa reads this you may get some entertaining stories regarding wedding photography.

We had some godawful posed ones taken at our wedding, 90% of which we rejected, one of which was a series of photos showing us running together towards the camera. I thought it would be funny if the last couple were of me shoving the wife over to one side and claiming gold for myself, but neither the wife nor photographer would let me. Bah.

I've read enough about wedding photography to know I never want to do it. Or any professional stuff, really.

We did a Grim... but with disposable cameras. Worked really well, got lots of great shots and cost about £50/£60 inc developing.

This is so common now you can buy special packs of cameras, like this look.

A wedding I attended, the bride asked me to do a favour as I had access to a fairly tidy digital camera and (more importantly) was approproiately bossy. During the sit-down food bit, I got all the people to come up as couples or families and stand in front of the balcony, which looked out onto a nice backdrop (they got married in a country house up North somewhere). Because they had a consistent background, when the pics where collated and arranged into an album, they had a really nice visual guest list.

You rang

Actually, I don't have that many anecdotes unless you count the fiasco of my brother's wedding which you've heard a 1000 times before, or so you told me. But for the cheap seats, my brother asked me to do his wedding pictures, stating that he didn't have much money, but only wanted a couple of dozen candid shots of friends and family anyway. Thsi turned into the following.
The night before the wedding the bride to be's mother turned up with a list of over 60 group shots she wanted done.
The best man, who's job it is to corral people on the day, amongst other things was about as useful as a lace condom, only less pretty.
Went into the church in glorious sun, came out to very dark overcast skies and insistent rain
The reception hall had really dark burgundy carpets and flock wallpaper in the same colour, which though I had lights with me, a couple of 1000k monoblocs, that carpet wallpaper combination is like a 8x neutral density filter, with added contrast for good measure.
So I set up in a corner trying my damnedest to get something that didn't look like it'd been shot on a instamatic because of the massive contrast caused by all that light swallowing upholstery (which proved to be impossible in the end, I simply needed about 12kw of flash to work with those colours swallowing light) while everybody else fucked off to the bar and stoically refused to come and have their picture taken apart from a few maiden aunts. Did I say the best man was a useless cunt. I still have to resist the urge to call him a wanker to his face nowadays.
And as for having no money, they spent £900 on the wedding cake. I gave up in the end and they got shit pictures which they didn't pay anything for.
And my brother in law still hasn't paid me for the 'how long will it last sweepstake' he suggested as I got closest with 4 years

Anyway. Oh, you wanted to hear about celebrity weddings...
I don't have any "interesting" anecdotes about those, unless you count the time I called the editor of OK and threatened to "bounce him off every flat surface in the entire building" because of him being a stupid spineless arse kissing cungt. But that's another story. He still avoids me to this day

You rang

Actually, I don't have that many anecdotes unless you count the fiasco of my brother's wedding which you've heard a 1000 times before, or so you told me. But for the cheap seats, my brother asked me to do his wedding pictures, stating that he didn't have much money, but only wanted a couple of dozen candid shots of friends and family anyway. Thsi turned into the following.
The night before the wedding the bride to be's mother turned up with a list of over 60 group shots she wanted done.
The best man, who's job it is to corral people on the day, amongst other things was about as useful as a lace condom, only less pretty.
Went into the church in glorious sun, came out to very dark overcast skies and insistent rain
The reception hall had really dark burgundy carpets and flock wallpaper in the same colour, which though I had lights with me, a couple of 1000k monoblocs, that carpet wallpaper combination is like a 8x neutral density filter, with added contrast for good measure.
So I set up in a corner trying my damnedest to get something that didn't look like it'd been shot on a instamatic because of the massive contrast caused by all that light swallowing upholstery (which proved to be impossible in the end, I simply needed about 12kw of flash to work with those colours swallowing light) while everybody else fucked off to the bar and stoically refused to come and have their picture taken apart from a few maiden aunts. Did I say the best man was a useless cunt. I still have to resist the urge to call him a wanker to his face nowadays.
And as for having no money, they spent £900 on the wedding cake. I gave up in the end and they got shit pictures which they didn't pay anything for.
And my brother in law still hasn't paid me for the 'how long will it last sweepstake' he suggested as I got closest with 4 years

Anyway. Oh, you wanted to hear about celebrity weddings...
I don't have any "interesting" anecdotes about those, unless you count the time I called the editor of OK and threatened to "bounce him off every flat surface in the entire building" because of him being a stupid spineless arse kissing cungt. But that's another story. He still avoids me to this day

oooh, double post. First of the week. Good stuff. I think it's something to do with the preview function or the 'at least one other post has been made' function, as that's the only time I get it...

There you have in a nutshell, the essence of good wedding photography. Being a bossy git. They will all forget you being a bossy bastard if the pictures look really good, they will forever think you're a useless cunt if the pictures are shit

Thanks.

Yep. Although from the couples POV, Get The Right Photographer is absolutely, totally, 100% top of the list. We must have gone through nearly 100 photographers websites, CDs and visits at a couple of shows.

We actually made a point of scheduling a visit to his home in Hampshire when we were in Gloucester or Portsmouth, just to make sure that we got on with the guy personality-wise. If you don't feel comfortable, it ain't going to work.

Did he throw in a fluffer?

We got on extremely well with ours. Then on the day he sent his assistant instead. Luckily, she was ace.

This is so common now you can buy special packs of cameras, like this look.

We did this too. The majority of pictures were by the kids getting carried away and so were utterly terrible, or the same scene/pose captured 3 times on 5 different cameras. It was worth doing though, as out of the few hundred crap ones there were a couple of decent piccies.

My mother in law got them developed. Wasn't too happy about the shots of the ushers mooning - especially as they were bending over a little too far, showing balls and all. Also, one of them face down behind the toilets covered in sick, before the ambulance took him away.

I was not amused, it was rather embarassing for me

Major, MAJOR schoolboy error.

I wasn't fucking paying for them

You can't rely on me to remember everything.