The what & why of my digicam

Barcelona, Madrid Airport, November 2006

After all that, I do actually use a digicam. this one to be precise:
A cheap, 5MP, fixed lens camera. Doesn't really take very good colour photos (especially with the blue colour cast outdoors), has limited controls, lots of noise at even ISO200.

So why did I buy it? 3 main reasons
1. It's got a fixed focal length lens (36mm-e, could be a bit wider)
2. It's cheap (all of €100)
3. I don't always want my SLR with me.

I use it primarily for people photos, accept the graininess and shoot almost exclusively in B&W. This means i can do a bit of noise reduction and post-processing and get decent results. Nice enough to print at 6"x8". For the kinds of photos I take with it (top one is an example), subject is rather more important than quality.

For such a basic camera, it's got some useful controls - manual ISO, exposure compensation, RGB colour compensation, several flash modes. Dialled down exposure lets me take
decnt indoor flash photos.

Of course it's not ideal but no makes a DMD yet, so I decided to go cheap and accept what I got.

Here's another example of the output, with a little work applied (i've now got a basic Lightzone template set up which is good for 95% of the output).

Skiing, Mount Norquay, Canada, Feb 2007