F80EXR in the real world – part 3

I have to say that, other than bad light images, I kind of like this camera. The F70EXR kicks its butt in bad light, but otherwise this is a rather pleasant camera to shoot with. It starts up faster, for one thing. The lens is slightly sharper on the edges, but that does not really bug me as I never noticed bad edges. I shoot 3:2 mostly.

So anyway, I carried the F80EXR with me to work yesterday and shot a few images under mixed daylight and fluorescent as I was about to leave … the quality of the results kind of surprised me.

I processed all of these images … be warned. You’ve seen enough “out of cam (OOC)” results from me that I will only post those from now on when explicitly testing or when it is instructive to do so.

I boosted the saturation quite a lot for this shot, and am rather satisfied by the color, lack of noise and reasonably crisp edges for a 1600 ISO image:

And just to underscore the quality of the text and edges:

I have a little brush for my keyboards … works great.

How about a fairly severe crop of the keypad on my phone? Again, the textures are reasonable for this camera:

My headset makes an interesting composition … the noise in the blurred background is pretty well controlled, you have to say. The detail on the wind protector microphone cover is decent.

And a very clever shot of my cubicle wall and its pattern. This was actually reasonably tough, and although I think the F70EXR might have done somewhat better, the F80EXR did just fine.

Once I left for the day, I made a quick shot at 300mm from my parking lot of the tunnel to the Scotiabank Center.The details here, even in the washed out background (it was misty and drizzling a bit) are very nice.

I can’t resist shooting images of geese at this time of year. They are everywhere and make decent subjects. Here is a heavily cropped shot from my car, through an open window.

Here is the original, uncropped. But I processed it to black and white since it was otherwise excruciatingly dull.

I shot a tree near the goose (if you look through my gallery, you will see this tree showing up now and again) … another that lent itself to BG&W processing.

Here’s the original with *no* processing at all. Still pretty decent.

As I was leaving the parking lot, the traffic was stopped by a gfround hog trying to cross. I pulled over and shot this image of him sitting in his hole. Severe crop. Kudos to the F80EXR for the details it retains at M size.

I left the parking lot and drove about a mile, where I pulled into a local park that was being shat upon by hundreds of geese. So I wandered into the scatlands and tried shooting more goose images. I could not get within 30 feet as they moved away from me in ripples … obviously they are quite nervous as a group.

So I walked quickly at them to force a take-off and got a few images of them in flight:

I really like that one. I panned to get the gees fairly sharp and the one top left is crystal sharp. Very pleasing. But this next one, which is cropped about 40%, is even better. I’m totally thrilled with this shot:

I was not kidding about the state of field into which I walked. I had to look down to walk through and avoid all of these political speeches in the grass …

As I neared the car, I decided to try some macros of the massive pine needles and abundant pine cones … I got tired of the blue cast from the F80EXR and switched to shade white balance. Much better …

When I got home, I shot a few in my garden while the light was there. My tulips are getting ready to bloom.

One of the local European Starlings. These are gorgeous birds, with iridescent feathers. But their loud squawking reminds me too much of a few individuals on the Fuji Talk Forum LOL …

I tur4ned my attention to my French Lilac bush. Shooting down into the center of the bush:

A mildly cropped shot from the side at full zoom macro:

And finally, one of my Bleeding Heart (Dicentra) plants coming up quickly now that Spring has sprung:

Yes, I must say that the F80EXR is not half bad in good light. It’s certainly pleasant to use 99% of the time, and the images at 6mp look pretty great.