I spent today with a borrowed digital camera taking pictures of my wife's porcelain figurines which she is planning to sell on eBay next year. 400 pictures later and the job is done. Tomorrow I start to photograph my excess camera gear also for sale next year.
I have given thought to doing this project with film but the thought of scanning hundreds of pictures made me put it at the bottom of the pile - several times. I took the pictures using natural light through a window with a reflector to fill the dark side (watch out for the dark side young Skywalker!) The borrowed camera was a Nikon (I'm not afraid of saying the name) Coolpix 5700. I hate it. It did do a reasonably good job of the pictures, but the autofocus is horrible for this and I wouldn't dare manual focus on an LCD display even if I could figure out how to make the camera do it. The aperture range on offer was f2 to f8. How can you get any descent depth of field with that! I did use the exposure compensation - if I didn't the white figurines were washed out - and turn off the auto popup flash - which took 3 seconds to decide it actually needed to be up. Please Pentax supply me with an SLR with a real viewfinder (not just another LCD screen behind a little window, real auto focus (just like my MZ-S or even my wife's MZ-3), lenses with real adjustability (I actually already have these, but I want them to fit the new camera) and a price tag that won't require a second or third mortgage. I already have permission from my wife (her blessings in fact) to buy a K mount digital, now all I need is the product. Leon http://www.bluering.org.au http://www.bluering.org.au/leon
