29 Mar 09 - Goole and the Trent

1st April 2009

For quite a long time now I have been looking at the idea of purchasing a good quality, capable, compact camera that I could carry with me more or less at all times so that I would have some alternative means of image capture other than the jaw dropplingly crappy “camera” built inot my mobile phone. My spec was relatively straightforward. The camera in question would have to have at least a 12Mp sensor, and a zoom range that could at least compete with my two most frequently used lenses for my DSLR. Given that those two between them covered a 35mm equivalent range from approx 27mm to 450mm that spec set the bar pretty high and, for ages there was very little out there that could compete. And then, just like buses, two came along together (or at least they didn’t “come along” but at least the race to get them into Jessops began). The two in question were the Olympus SP-590UZ with a 26 times optical zoom and the Nikon Coolpix F90 with a 24 times optical zoom. The price differential was small with the Nikon product coming in at only £40 dearer than the Olympus. In terms of bells, bangs and whistles there was also little to chose, so I decided to purchase the first one of the two that made it onto Jessop’s shelves. On Saturday 28th March the race was one by a short head by the Nikon; that met my spec quite nicely – the 24x optical zoom means that it covers the enitre range of my two existing zooms with a comfortably large overlap at the long end. So having purchased the little beast, I spent Saturday afternoon learning to drive it, then decided to head out for Goole on the Sunday to try it out on some real subjects (ie, ships!). Sadly, there weren’t that many around, and the ones that were present were mostly old familiar regulars. One nice little piece of quality though was berthed at Neap House in the rather strange shape of STK-1012. I’ve only ever seen two others of this odd class of small Russian river/sea ships and, given the less than ideal location, I was keen to see how the Nikon performed. As an added educational motivator I decided to go out with only the Nikon and none of the rest of the gear – this provded a tiny bit unsettling, but the incredibly light weight of the compact after the weight of the DSLR was a pure joy. You can make your own judgement on the following photos but, all in all, I think the Coolpix performed very creditably. In particular, it seemed to cope very well indeed with the difficult lighting at Neap House – indeed I would rate it’s efforts as the best I’ve ever produced there. No image that it produced anywhere required more than the most basic of Photoshop tweaks at the post-processing stage and, with the exception of a little cropping and sharpening, the vast majority of these images are more or less as they came off the camera. I was using the D-Lighting feature at it’s highest setting . This claims to preserve detail in areas of deep shadow but, whilst it generally apperas to do what it says on the tin, there were a couple of lighting situations where it proved to be a slight disadvantage so, in future, I think I’ll have to be alittle more selective in the use of that particular gizmo. I noticed that, in most situations, the camera had a tendency to slightly over-expose and this is completely contrary to my experience with my three DSLRs which generally underexposed (in particular if there was so much as a sliver of light sky in the shot). Anyway, here are the photos.

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