Camera Labs

I have had this Olympus C770 Camedia since 2004, when I bought it for £179.
With a mostly metal body, pop up flash with twin discharge tubes and the ability to shoot Mpeg video this little camera with its big X10 zoom was a pretty up to date tool in its day
It has a 4 meg CCD sensors and boasts full auto through A,S & P to full manual control including focus.

On the plus side it was cheap has suprisingly good glass and was very well built and gives you lots of control.

On the down side the start up time is 20 secs, the batteries dont last long (I always carry 4) and the auto focus sometimes gets a bit confused.


By trackend at 2011-01-08


These five images all were taken in Cornwall with the little 4 meg C770
the post processing consisted of a crop and pressing auto correction in
microsoft office picture manager


By trackend at 2011-01-08


By trackend at 2011-01-08


By trackend at 2011-01-08


By trackend at 2011-01-08


By trackend at 2011-01-08

Image #6 is by far the strongest composition wise. Very nice how the tree and foreground greenery frames the water fall.

A query Re "auto correction in microsoft office picture manager " I am not sure if you mean to say you let the microsoft utility do auto brightness/contrast/color but typically a dedicated even free image editing utility like Gimp can provide a much more fine grained ability to make adjustments. Some of the shots with water and sky seem to be a touch too hot as the contrast curve is a tad steep.

I think image #3 of the isolated water fall is a bit too cropped and could have stood to include a bit more of those nice flowers/plants on the left hand side.

I totally agree with your well put comments Capital, now days I use PSE8 & Light Room.
What I am attempting to show (perhaps very poorly) is ignoring basic composition & processing errors, even using a small meg count old camera does not mean the results are unusable.
Obviously times change my present camera is a D7000 but someone on a very tight budget can still run with the pack using second hand kit that could cost less the £100

I think another way of putting it is that as soon as the recording device gets in the way of the desired end product that we need explore a different device. In this case the recording device still does a good job despite technical advances in digital imaging.

On a related note, I was watching something recently and they referred to the often repeated statement that "cameras should be thought of tools for image creation" they instead suggested a I think more eloquent statement along the lines of "that instead of cameras being thought of as tools, that they be thought of instruments, instruments which facilitate the creation of an image."

Although as I am trying to show if you have a low end camera you can still take usable images.
I believe if someone enjoys using their particular camera it can up their game, as it encourages more use which cascades into better images.
This is one of the reasons people are so passionate about the camera they own.

Enjoyment in using your particular camera is very important, infact I would say it is probably runs along side price as one of the biggest deciding factors for people as the general caperbilities of nearly all DSLR's these days are excellent and all are able to produce technicaly good images but if the user dislikes the camera they are using it has a decidedly detrimental effect on the end results.

A potentially spectacular landscape picture may well turn into a run of the mill snap just because the photographer doesnt like spending too much time actually using their camera.

Sadly I think some people have trouble making the distinction between a "good" photo and one that has lots of detail when viewed jumbotron size.

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Canon 40D | Tokina 11-16 f2.8 | Canon 50mm f1.4

www.flickr.com/claycarey

Fantastic shots! I especially like the first and the last one.

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