Optimism with compact digital cameras
I’ve just been to a rally and, of course, there were lots of people with compact digital camera trying to take photos of the race.
I say trying because few of their photographs will come out properly. Cars obviously move quite quickly in a race so for one thing, most people will have a lot of blur in the image they’ve taken. Compact digital cameras are also rather slow in actually taking the photo so the majority of people won’t even have an image of the car at all which is probably the greater problem.
That slowness in capturing the image is one of the main differences in cheap cameras vs expensive ones. For example, when I press the button on my Nikon D40X, the camera takes the photo pretty much immediately. You still need to track the car in the viewfinder obviously but when you don’t need to allow for any delay. Compare that to the Nikon 3700 which I used when taking the photos last year: the (large) fraction of a second between pressing the button and the camera capturing the image made it almost impossible to get a decent photo of the cars.
Usually there’d be a third problem in that the flash on compacts is usually automatic which, of course, doesn’t go down too well with the race organisers as it’s rather dangerous to have a bright flash in your eyes as you’re about to turn a corner just beside a sheer drop which is, naturally, exactly the type of spot that you’d stand to get the best photos. Today was quite lucky though as it was sunny so the flashes weren’t required.
Copyright © 2007-2011 by A Time of Magic. All rights reserved.
Related posts: