Grocery Flowers

When I got into digital photography with a vengeance in 2005, I purchased a Fuji F11 from an eBay seller. The F11 was never officially imported into North America, although a few were brought in to Hawaii at one point. Thus, my camera as considered grey market and was not serviceable at all in Canada or the USA.

Anyway ... the Fuji F10 and F11 started a craze for decent high ISO performance in compact cameras. I used to wander in stores and shoot images in available light at 1600 ISO just to show it could be done. Some images from that era ...






As you can see, the images are decently detailed and free of noise. The reason for them being free of noise is that I ran Neat Image noise reduction on every shot. Back then, Neat Image was fairly heavy handed if you weren't careful, so I became really adept at tuning it.

So here we are today and I carry the F70EXR with me now and again ... this camera has a macro mode that is perhaps a little less magnifying than that of the F11, but it has stabilization and the ability to get its magnification at about 50mm, which is a real bonus for backgrounds. So I happened to be in a store the other day and caught a few images of their flowers while I was at it.

The Poinsettias caught my eye first. The red ones being very hard to capture, but the white not so bad.



Because of the stabilization, I was able to shoot with auto ISO 800 instead of 1600 in the store. These were flowers after all ...



What I notice about these shots is that the details hang around quite nicely.


And the tones are also pretty nice for flourescent lighting ...


Or whatever it is they use in stores these days ...



This cam seems to do it just as well as the F11 did ... that's nice to know ... and the bonus is that I needed almost no noise reduction at all ... a tiny tweak of the luminance NR slider on in ACR is all I did ...