First light
After many passionate conversations about photography with Pascal, I decided to upgrade my digital camera. I didn't feel quite ready, technically and financially, for the full power of DSLR but I definitely wanted to try my hands on the expressiveness of manual mode. I retired my Nikon L10 and I'm now the proud owner of a Sony H9.
It features a huge LCD and given it's zooming power, it's quite lite. It also has a bunch of manual controls. One thing that I really wanted was bracketing. I had tried to do HDR with my L10 but you need to fiddle with the control dial to change the exposure. There is no way you can to that without moving the camera and the slightest movement will ruin a HDR image; all my previous attempts where just a bunch of splotchy messes. Now, at last, I can do it. I mean, it just works, and the result is... Wow!
The H9 has a "Night Shot" mode but it's kind of a joke. Sure you'll be able to see in the dark but it disables all the manual settings so you get stuck with ultra noisy super sensitive ISO.
Setting the manual focus is tedious but once done, there is almost no shutter lag and the burst mode will save up to three images per seconds. Combined with the 15x zoom, this is perfect for sneaky urban photography.
A word on my HDR setup. I confess, I seriously messed my white balance so I had to go with low saturation tone mapping. Sorry about that. All HDR were created from three separate jpeg exposures: +1ev, 0ev, -1ev. I combined and tone mapped them with Qtpfsgui. Qtpfsgui has all the right knobs but its UI can get confusing. It's great to play with the parameters of the tone mapping operators but I will definitely need a more streamlined pipeline. So far, so good. I love my new toy.