OT: The PowerShot G1X Mark II in Vietnam

Susan and I recently returned from a fascinating tour of Vietnam and Cambodia put on by RoadScholar. Neither of us had been to southeast Asia and we both enjoyed it immensely.

Just before embarking I purchased a Canon PowerShot G1X Mark II to see if it might be the travel camera I've been seeking (see this post, for example.) Alas, the answer is no.

The PowerShot is plenty light (1.2 pounds) and small; probably too small for my hands. One of its biggest flaws is a stupidly positioned Record button that I hit accidentally several times. That alone was enough to disqualify it. 

But there are other problems. The control dial on the back is too small for me to operate effectively. The mode dial on the top right doesn't lock and is easily nudged to a different setting. I sometimes found myself in Manual mode without knowing it. And for some reason, the focus bracket kept migrating to the lower right of the frame (perhaps because it's a touch screen? I'm not sure) and had to be re-positioned. These problems were a constant irritation.

One of my complaints with the iPhone 5s camera is its poor performance in low light. I had hoped the PowerShot's performance would be better, and it is...but not as much as I would have wished. You can see the noise in the boat shot, taken at ISO 800. The focusing in low light was slow and often inaccurate. 

The battery is pretty puny. On several days I was out of power by noon. And the 12.5 - 62.5mm (24 - 120mm equivalent) lens turned out to be shorter than I needed for most of the shooting I did.

So I'm not keeping the PowerShot. But here are a few shots it produced (bear in mind that these are JPEGS; they were raw files originally).

Cambodian Boy

Boat and Paddle, Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Temple Demons, Cambodia

The details: all shot with Canon PowerShot G1X Mark II and 12.5 - 62.5mm lens
Boy: 1/100 sec., f9.0, ISO 400, 39mm
Boat: 1/25 sec., f4.5, ISO 800, 18mm 
Demons: 1/1250 sec., f4.0, ISO 400, 26mm

OT: The hunt for a travel camera, continued

Our next trip will be to Vietnam, and I had hoped to find a capable camera small enough to carry easily but large enough to give acceptable results in poor light. I tried using only the iPhone 5s camera in Italy (described here) but found it lacking in low light performance.

I previously "auditioned" two mirrorless cameras, the Fujifilm XT-1 and the Olympus OM-D EM-1 (described here). Neither impressed me enough to purchase. I felt I could go lighter without sacrificing too much quality, so the search continued.

Friends have helpfully weighed in with suggestions, ranging from the Nikon 1 through the Canon S and PowerShot series. After looking at a lot of specs and reviews I decided to order a Fuji XM-1 body and a Fuji XF 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 zoom. The XM body is light at 10 ounces, partly because it has no viewfinder, but uses the same APS-C sensor as costlier and heavier Fuji models. The zoom covers the focal range I'd like to have, though it weighs a bit over a pound. Still, the combination is half the weight of my Pentax K-5 with the Pentax 16-50mm f2.8 zoom attached.

Fast forward: the XM-1 and lens arrived. I put the lens on the body, and immediately got an error message: "Lens Control Error". An email exchange with B&H suggested doing a firmware update (to version 1.20).  Because the lens was released after the body, the thinking went, this might fix it. I dutifully ran the firmware update but it didn't solve the problem, so the whole lot is going back to B&H.

My wife is telling me that I have the worst luck with cameras. She may have a point. My K-5 was defective when it first arrived, so I waited around while Pentax looked at the body and decided to send me a different body along with the adjusted 16-50mm. I'm not sure the 16-50mm is at full performance anymore (see here). Come to think of it, the only digital camera I've owned that never had a problem was the one she gave me for Christmas in 2003: the Canon Rebel. Maybe I should let her choose my next camera...or maybe I should return to the Canon fold. I grow weary of the chase.

In fact, I wearied enough to order a Canon: the PowerShot G1 X Mark II. It will arrive in a couple of days. Stay tuned.

Around the yard this fall

Fall is a wonderful time for photography. The colors are vibrant and the weather often vivid, with clear skies and that beautiful, low-angled sun that just says "autumn" to me.

This year we were surprised to see pink among the yellows, reds, and golds in our yard. Our landscaper, Mark Willcher, planted a Camellia last spring that is now covered in pink blossoms with amazing yellow stamens. Based on web searches, I believe it is a Camellia sasanqua. I took some close-ups after a rain shower. Strangely enough, I didn't notice the ant in the blossom until I was looking at the image in Lightroom.

Another gorgeous shrub has been in our yard since we moved here, but I don't know its name (update: Euonymus allatus, a.k.a. burning bush). Its foliage turns a brilliant vermilion in the fall, complemented with orange-red berries.

Camellia sasanqua

Vermilion Bush

The details:
(Camellia) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/80 sec. at f/6.3, ISO 800, 45mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(Vermilion) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/80 sec. at f/3.2, ISO 800, 36mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)

Italy with the iPhone 5s

As I previously posted, after auditioning two small DSLRs I decided to carry only my iPhone 5s as my camera in Italy. Susan and I spent 16 days in September 2014 visiting Rome, Volterra, Florence, the Cinque Terre, Siena and the Tuscan countryside around Greve in Chianti.

The 5s photos came out as I expected. Images in daylight were very good: mostly accurate exposure, good color balance, and decent shadow detail. I downloaded and used the Camera+ application on the 5s. It allows you to split the focus target into two, one for focus and the other for exposure. That was helpful in high contrast scenes. Camera+ has other features but I haven't used them much. The Ponte Vecchio and statue shots are examples in good light (morning and evening, respectively).

However, returning home to work on the files in Lightroom reminded me why I shoot JPEG only when there's no other choice. There just isn't much latitude to work with in a JPEG file, compared to RAW. Blown highlights are truly blown, and LR adjustments can lead to odd results. For instance, look closely at the woman's face in the Central Market image. There's no choice but JPEG with the 5s, and it's a drawback.

Low light results were pretty bad, consistent with the tiny sensor in the 5s. The Wine Tasting image is a not-quite-horrible example. There were a couple of night scenes I would have liked to capture with a APS-c box; they were awful on the 5s. 

Ah well. It's small, it's light, and it doubles as a smartphone, so it was a good choice for a trip where photography wasn't top priority and travelling light was. My expectations weren't too high so I wasn't very disappointed, but I hope to carry something better on my next trip. Perhaps by then I'll have found a smaller camera I can live with.

Ponte Vecchio, Florence

Statue on Ponte Sant'Angelo, Rome

Central Market, Rome

Wine Tasting, Volterra

Off topic: Renting and trying out cameras

Much has been written about the demise of brick-and-mortar camera stores. In our area, we've lost Penn Camera and Ritz over the past few years. Everyone assumes the reason is online competition. It does seem hard to compete with mammoth warehouse operations like B&H and Amazon, with their huge inventories, low prices, quick delivery and sales tax advantage. But the prospective camera buyer who wants to handle a new camera has few options. I'm thinking about buying, so I rented two new models for a few days.

Our recent trip to Nova Scotia convinced me I'd be happier with a lighter kit. I currently carry a Pentax K-5, a Pentax 16-50mm f2.8 zoom, and a Sigma 70-300mm f4-5.6 macro zoom in a Lowepro Fastpack 200 backpack. It weighs almost 9 pounds; with the laptop I include when traveling, over 11 pounds. Doesn't sound too bad, but carrying it on multi-hour hikes became tiring. The last straw was deciding to leave it home one morning and consequently missing a shot of a bald eagle perched less than 100 feet away on a beautiful rock overlooking an azure ocean. Nuts.

I've watched with interest as mirrorless cameras have become the next big thing. "Big" only figuratively; they are substantially smaller and lighter than conventional DSLRs. The Fujifilm XT-1 and the Olympus OM-D EM-1 (who makes up these names?) have garnered praise, so I rented each for a few days from Lensrentals.com.

I found it hard to get used to the electronic viewfinders. They are wonderfully bright, even in dim light--terrific for available light shooting, as I found when shooting with the Fuji at an outdoor evening event. But in daylight the viewfinders tend to hunt for the right illumination level as bright light and shadow areas move through the view, which I find disconcerting. They also have a bit of time lag that is a little distracting. And probably my 40+ years of using optical viewfinders has conditioned me to such an extent that it's just hard to adapt.

Both cameras fit my hand well, start up fast and are responsive in shooting. Their designs differ somewhat. The Fuji has more physical dials, reminiscent of film SLRs, and I found it pretty easy to use. The Olympus relies more on menus, menus, menus. I didn't use either one enough to form an opinion about their auto-focus, but I did miss several shots relying on it. Might have been user error, since a couple days is not enough time to learn a camera. I was too cheap to spend more than the approximately $200 it cost for a camera and two lenses for four or five days, and life kept me from testing them on several days.

But I took a lot of A-B comparison shots with the Pentax and Fuji, and also with the Pentax and Olympus. To make sure I had good exposures, I used exposure bracketing on all three cameras. When I sat down to look at the images I discovered that Lightroom 4 doesn't support the Fuji or Olympus raw formats. The workaround is to download Adobe's free DNG converter and use it to convert the raws to DNG format (I don't need to do this with the Pentax because it supports DNG in camera.) After that exercise I was able to import them into Lightroom and use its comparison tool to really look at them side by side.

The main finding: my Pentax 16-50 zoom isn't working well. No matter how carefully I tried, its images weren't as crisp as those from the Sigma on the K-5 or the other four lenses on the Fuji and Olympus. There is some history: the 16-50 has been in the shop once. I bought it and the K-5 new at the same time, and something was seriously out of whack. I had purple fringing at a hallucinogenic level. Camera and lens went back to Pentax, who sent me a different K-5 body and the same lens, which they said had been adjusted to meet specs. I think something has changed, and I suspect it is in the 16-50.

It's worth noting that the Fuji has an APS-C sized sensor, like the Pentax, while the Olympus uses a smaller, micro four thirds sensor. I was interested to see whether I would notice a difference. The answer is yes, but only when looking at pretty large magnification. If I often made big prints, I think I would favor the APS-C. And the Fuji is very similar to the Olympus in size and weight, which matter to me quite a bit. Advantage Fuji.

In the end, though, I decided not to buy a new camera. Our next trip is to Italy--God knows, a photogenic place--but our tour operator warns about theft, and repeatedly urges us to pack light. At this point I believe I will rely solely on the iPhone 5s (which I've written about here and here). There is more to life than photography...I'll keep repeating it like a mantra...and when we return I can concentrate on weightier work, so to speak, and get the 16-50 repaired.

If you've read this far, you might want to see some images from the Fuji and the Olympus. Here they are. Remember that these are JPEGs made from the raw files. The only tweaking was Lightroom's low sharpening for screen, so don't read too much into them. You can see some vignetting in the upper left of the Olympus 12mm (bottom shot). All were shot at the Rocky Islands at Great Falls in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park.

The details: (Top) Fuji XT-1 handheld, 1/1900 sec. at f4.0, ISO 400, 23mm (SF23mmF1.4 R)
(Second) Fuji XT-1 handheld, 1/450 sec. at f8.0, ISO 400, 35mm (XSF55-200mmF3.5-4.8 R LM OIS)
(Third) Olympus OM-D EM-1 handheld, 1/200 sec. at f8.0, ISO 100, 47mm (LUMIX G VARIO 35-100mm/F2.8)
(Bottom) Olympus OM-D EM-1 handheld, 1/2000 sec. at f2.8, ISO 100, 12mm (LUMIX G VARIO 12-35mm/F2.8)

Nova Scotia II

Leaving Peggy's Cove we traveled west along the southern coast and spent two nights at Heron's Rest*, a gorgeous cottage on a wooded hillside at the end of a gravel road. When we arrived our hostess showed us around. At the bottom of a slope was a gurgling, completely deserted stretch of Petite Riviere waiting for us to jump in and play, which we did in due course. Good thing, too: Hurricane Arthur complicated outdoor activities the next day so our first dip was also our last, but it was memorable. The cottage was built by a shipwright, we were told. After weathering the hurricane inside with nary a creak nor rattle, we were convinced of its storm-worthiness.  

Petite Riviere

Our trip stuck mostly to the coasts, but we took one leg through the center of the western part of Nova Scotia. In the interior is Kejimkujik National Park (shortened to "Keji" by most). We had only part of a day to spend in that beautiful place. We chose to hike a trail to Peter Point, at the end of which one emerges onto a small sandy beach on a pristine lake. Like many spots we visited, it was deserted. That was one of many "oh, wow" moments.

Beach at Peter Point

View from Peter Point

*Heron's Rest was one of several excellent lodgings Susan booked through Airbnb. We really like this approach. We avoid overpriced hotels. There are scads of choices in location and types of lodging. And we have met many gracious, helpful hosts eager to point us toward the best sights, sounds, and food (in Halifax they even gave us bus tokens...thanks, Tim and Colleen!) If you travel, you should try it.

On the subject of travel tips, here's another: travel with someone who loves to travel, loves to plan travel, and loves you.

Susan, Travel Ace

The details:
(Petite Riviere) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/250 sec. at f/8, ISO 800, 34mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(Beach) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/50 sec. at f/9, ISO 200, 16mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(View) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/400 sec. at f/9, ISO 400, 28mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(Susan) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/2000 sec. at f/8, ISO 400, 28mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)

Nova Scotia I

In July 2014 Susan and I toured Nova Scotia. We had often heard that it is a place of great natural beauty, with deep and exciting music and dance traditions. We were not disappointed.

Our first stop outside Halifax was Peggy's Cove, a small South Coast community at St. Margaret's Bay.  The lighthouse there is said to be the most photographed one in Nova Scotia (or Canada, or the universe). It sits atop a hill of exposed granite, and on this day it was wrapped in fog. Perhaps that delayed the tour buses and I was able to get a few shots of the lighthouse alone.

Lighthouse at Peggy's Cove

Like many villages we visited, Peggy's Cove is a working fishery. That isn't surprising, since Nova Scotia is almost surrounded by water and is near major fishing resources. It's one of many factors that make it a fascinating province (others include a contentious political history, settlement by several nations and cultures, a complex geology and a phenomenal tidal range in the Bay of Fundy). I will add photos from others parts of Nova Scotia in later posts.

Boats at Peggy's Cove

Freedom 55

The details: 
(Lighthouse) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/2000 sec. at f/8, ISO 400, 16mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(Boats) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/1000 sec. at f/8, ISO 800, 16mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)
(Freedom) Pentax K-5 handheld 1/1000 sec. at f/8, ISO 800, 43mm (smc Pentax-DA* 16-50mm F2.8 ED AL [IF] SDM)