F70EXR -- First Review and Test

So I sold my Canon G10 today and stopped at Henrys on the way home to pick up the Fuji F70EXR, which is of course a leading contender for my next concert camera. It has a lot of interesting features, most notably very long reach with a 27-270mm lense ... almost a strong a range as my 18-200VR, which is 27-300 effective ...

So I will be testing it over the next few days to see if it is a keeper. It must be useful at rock concerts, else I have wasted my money.

So far, I like it ... my impressions are that it is fun to use, reasonably good image quality and adequate video. I know that sounds lukewarm, but that's the nature of the camera business these days. They will never build the perfect camera because then no other camera would sell. I.e. they cannot afford to build a camera that is all things to all people ... that would be fatal, even for the lucky one to do it ...

Anyway ... test 1 was video. I started simple, shot a fairly dark room with soft light filtering in through blinds. Not all that much light and quite a challenge. The F70EXR did ok ... zoom works during filming, gotta watch the close focus though as you need 60 feet to use 270mm. Audio is different from the F11, which was fatally flawed for rock concerts. I still need to test that. Video quality looks ok ... stabilization does in fact seem to work, as even at 270mm I see little jitter. There is some grain and color noise, but I guess I will live with that for now.



The other test I performed today was a simple resolution test. Hang a newspaper from the mantle and shoot it at different zoom levels. Use flash to eliminate movement. Shoot at low ISO.


The crops look ok at longer zoom. Remember to double click on the image to open the 800px version.


You can see lines in the words DAVE WILLIS and that is quite decent. By contrast, here is how the 18-200VR and 70-300VR do it ...

There you can see that the 18-200VR has crisper edges but does not really resolve any more detail. The 70-300VR does, however, drastically outresolve the little cam ... it's a great consumer lens.

So ... first tests both passed. The F70EXR looks pretty promising. I'll be doing a dynamic range test and an ISO stepladder at some point soon.

Rachelle at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at the Mill of Kintail

Rachelle's turn. Again, I had not seen her before, and in fact I did not see her at the Mill of Kintail. However, I did see her at the bridge, and she agreed to pose for Kyle and I for quite some time.

Interestingly, as I went through these poses, I found Rachelle's instincts for water posing to be every bit as good as Stella's. And of course Sam's. How interesting that we could get so many excellent images in the space of half an hour ...

We opened with her sitting in the water. This went nicely and after a while Kyle took over for a few minutes while I snuck that image of Marcus from the side and distance.



I really do find that shots near water work so well when you add some tilt.

Anyway, when I turned my attention back to Rachelle, I asked her to lie on her stomach and then tried to find a good angle. I thought about a full body shot, but that was surprisingly ineffective. Kyle may have something of that sort, perhaps I'll see his images at the review.

Anyway, I did get one I liked ...


Actually, I got a dozen I liked, but they are similar enough that there is no point posting a bunch of them.

I then asked her for a side pose. And this proved fruitful, as both close shots and body shots worked very well. I really like this pair of images.



And finally, we asked her to stand up again but found that the sun was too low to get any shots with a glow. So I captured a couple with the bridge as background and called it a day.


That's a really grainy shot ... not quite sure what I did, but I really fried it. Still, with enough processing it works fine in web sizes and probably up to an 8x10 ...

Stella at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at the Mill of Kintail

Stella is a model from Barrett Palmer Models whom I had not seen before. I first noticed her while shooting Bryanna in the cloisters when some other photographers had Stella nearby. I took the opportunity to swing the lens around for this shot ...


The next time I saw her was at the bridge, where she was the second model to enter the water -- right after Sam got out. I had just been experimenting with slow shutter to capture the soft, flowing water look and I started out with one of those.


And again, I find sitting in water shots deadly dull unless they are close in or the angles are somehow manipulated to jar the viewer a bit. Jarring enough?

From this crazy angle, I found that I could fill the frame in really unusual ways, and I am really pleased with how these look.



I even pulled back a bit to shoot more of the body once in a while ...


The next one is a nice angle of her shoulders. I found that she presents herself in a compact way and does not present much of a problem with legs and arms at weird angles. In fact, I got so many great images that it was a struggle to pare it down to these 9.


She got into the deep water and I got a great series of images. I only processed a few, since they are representative of the others.

I should not here that I had a world class brain fart while shooting this series. I set a very low ISO, which caused me to be shooting low shutter speeds. That in turn caused me to get softness around the eyes. I should have noticed it was happening and raised ISO to 400 or even 800 ... far better a wee bit of grain than slight blur. These are still acceptable, but I am not happy with them from a sharpness perspective.

Finally, she got up on top of the shelf and lay in the water. I shot several full body images, but none of them floated my boat ... only this one worked. Again mainly because of the unusual composition.


And that's Stella's story at the Kintail workshop.

Nick's Skateboarding Career

Stumbled upon a few videos of Nick when he was skateboarding ... the first one made me LMAO ....



The next one is a nice retrospective of 8 years of the On Deck team ...



Nick injured his knee a few years ago and has only recently got back into skating ... in Europe no less. He spent 4 intensive days in Barcelona hitting some of the more famous spots ... lucky guy ...

Anyway ... just wanted to put it up here for the record ...

Jason and Bryanna at a Crombie McNeill Workshop at the Mill of Kintail

Bryanna and Jason (from Barrett Palmer Models, as usual) were the first models I was able to work with when we got started. We wandered to the back of the cloisters, where there was a trellis with room for two people to stand under. We shot some images in the natural light, but it was surprisingly dark in there so that we started playing with the reflectors.

If you read yesterday's blog entry, the one with Sam and Marcus, you will remember that I tend to forget to get head shots of the individual models. Well, someone else was controlling the models at first here and ... tada ... head shots of the models.



Then it was time for coupledom ... well, you know what I mean. Things started off with a very pretty image of them together ... Jason looks a little uncomfortable, but it almost works anyway. Bryanna's expression is perfect.


I asked her to step behind Jason and put her chin on his shoulder ... that gave us this lovely image.


His right eye is doing something weird there, but no matter what I tried in the liquify filter, it simply would not repair. Ah well ...

I believe at this point we asked Jason to go for more of a lusty look and he did a pretty good job here ...


At this point we walked around the corner to the cloisters, which was a stone hallway with a couple of small windows in the back and 5 lovely vine-encrusted archways in front. At one end was a hearth, in which I found an awesome wooden cross with a circle. I dragged that out for us to play with ... I love shooting with props.

At the other end was a stone doorway. which proved fruitful for framing the models (not my idea ... Kyle gets the credit for that one.)

I opened by asking Bryanna to lean against the cross. This turned out quite nicely.


She also leaned against the wall in the soft light and we filled with a couple of reflectors. Nice light.


The light was dim in there, so I shot some with the D70s as well (with the Nikon 50mm 1.8) and this one turned out very nicely.


I did another, which turned out to be prime for the vampire treatment. Click on it to open it up to 800 pixels and you will see the fangs. Very cool ...


But not as cool as this LeStat treatment of the next shot ... wow ...


The final shot of the series is a lovely close face shot of Bryanna ...


Awesome eyelashes ...

And that's it for Bryanna and Jason. Very nice work and I am so glad I got to shoot Bryanna this time. A great face for head shots and she works very well in a couple.

World Community Grid -- Give a Little Back

There are sites around the world that use a massive grid of home computers to help process gargantuan data sets in search of answers to important questions. Two that I know of are SETI@Home and the World Community Grid.

SETI will farm out data sets to your PC to be analyzed for signs of extra-terrestrial life. It uses a client that can run as a screen saver and it looks very cool. You can form groups and communities and it becomes a fun contest to see who can contribute the most processing power :-)

I gave them a lot of days of processing back about 10 years ago, but changed jobs and lost my connection to that community.

The World Community Grid, however, searches for answers more local to home. For example, I processed 4 days worth of Dengue Fever data sets in phase 1 of their search. They just sent a confirmation that this phase has ended a few moments ago.

If you tend to leave your machines on all the time, consider hooking up to one of these two projects and giving something back to the planet ...