The Online Photographer

World's Wackiest Hot-Shoe Attachment

This is hilarious. And lest you think it's merely hi-jinks, I really do think this could be a useful photographic tool for portrait sessions with small children! It would attract their attention and even reward them for being "good." I can see it working, I really can. (Maybe that's because it would probably work on me.)

Bravo, Federico.

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Mike  (with thanks to Yoram Nevo)

Photography Legacy—Part Two

By Gordon Lewis

I was hoping my comments about one’s photographic legacy would stimulate discussion and, sure enough, it did. The comments fell into three general camps: The first camp was of the opinion that legacies are beyond our immediate control. Enjoy what you’re doing and let the future take care of itself. The second camp offered suggestions or shared their personal example of ways they share their photography with others. Photo blogs and personal websites are popular options. The third camp essentially shared the existential angst expressed in my posting; i.e., “What’s the point of all this?”

Well, for the record, I’m not quite as worried about legacy issues as my posting implied. I’m not obsessed with leaving a “LEGACY” in the sense of future generations recognizing the brilliance of my work. My main goal is simply to enjoy what I’m doing in the here and now. I do, however, think there’s some value in my gathering, sorting, and annotating my work so that anyone who had a future interest in it could determine its basic circumstances or significance, if only to me.

Here's one of my favorites from back when I was in college in the early '70s. The kid had chocolate ice cream smeared on  his face. I like to imagine that he's now the CEO of some dot-com.

As for “putting my work out there,” my interest in other people’s appreciation and approval is not so great that I that I will devote significant hours and dollars to printing and submitting portfolios to galleries, magazines, coffee shops, libraries, etc. (but I have great respect for photographers who do.)

So what was my point? Simply this: It’s worth giving some thought to why you’re involved in photography and what you’re putting in those boxes. If you think it’s “just pictures,” then perhaps you should think a bit more.

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Gordon

Gordon Lewis has over 20 years experience as a journalist, photographer, scriptwriter and Web designer. His articles and photographs have been published in Camera 35, Petersen’s Photographic, Camera & Darkroom, and Popular Photography. His television credits include comedy hits such as Amen, A Different World, Family Matters, and In Living Color. Having exhausted all reservoirs of humor, he now designs interactive multimedia training for corporate clients. Gordon resides with his wife and three children just north of Philadelphia, the birthplace of freedom and current murder capital of the USA.

Featured Comment by Benzo: "I haven't commented yet, but I might as well jump in...my personal 'legacy' project is somewhat the opposite of what most people's are. I've always been a (minor) history buff, and as I've grown up, I've found stories about my families history fascinating. As such, I'm working on getting family members (mostly grandparents, great uncles and aunts and so forth) to sit for portraits, and then interviewing them. I got the idea from an art history teacher who interviewed as many artists he purchased from as possible, and now owns some rare historical material (first-hand interviews on tape and paper) pertaining to those artists. While my project probably won't have the same historical impact, it's a wonderful way to a) learn about and preserve both the histories and identities of your family and individual family members, b) form closer relationships with said family members, and c) develop your portraiture skills.

"I'm also photographing and writing about various family heirlooms. Hopefully the project will take off over the Thanksgiving/Christmas season, when I can herd as many people to my studio as possible, and with luck it will culminate with a large collection of archival negs and prints, and CDs and paper transcripts of interviews, stories and the preservation of family history. Not really my personal artistic legacy per se (which isn't something I worry about as much—I'm a 'have fun' photographer), but the project will do more than just perpetuate my work into future generations—it will be a valuable resource for my great grandchildren who wanted to learn about their ancestors. And it's a great excuse to take a lot of photos and spring for some nice prints!"

Notes From Home

Just a brief note to offer a grateful thanks to all the well-wishers from all over—some of which have posted as comments and many of which have not. All have been received with humble gratitude. Thanks.

Notes from home—Lulu's got new bling! Fancy wide red collar (the proper term for this self-tightening type is a martingale—thanks to Greg Christie for that information) and a brand-new engraved gold I.D. tag. The girl is stylin'. It wasn't easy getting this picture, either, since even the littlest thing the happens in the back yard demands Lulu's immediate and enthusiastic attention.

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Mike

Card Practices

A commenter to the last posting named FredW passed along some good tips about using cards in digital cameras. Fred points out that these are common recommendations frequently found on the internet, and we've been over them on this site a time or two already, but they're worth repeating all the same:

1. Always reformat a card after deleting previous images.
2. Never delete a file in-camera—let the camera write new picture files sequentially until the card is filled up.
3. Never write to the card on your computer—let the camera be the only device that writes to the card.

With cards of all kinds so cheap now, there's really no reason not to have as many as you need for your typical shooting sessions.

Ironically, it might be the case that the more a photographer shoots, the less likely he or she is to violate any of the above rules, simply because it's easier and more efficient to simply fill up cards one after the other when shooting and then download everything for later editing than it is to fuss over editing and deleting in-camera, as you shoot. It's probably occasional users who shoot much less and have only one card who may find themselves following bad practices.

Has anyone tried Marc's "ImageIngester" yet? I'm curious about it but I haven't tried it yet. It seems like a good idea that could help streamline this aspect of one's workflow. I'm conscious of having a pretty poor workflow in general, since I shoot relatively sparingly (and I'm relatively lazy), but I haven't gotten around to doing anything about it yet.

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Mike

Nits and Picks in the Digital Age—The Final Chapter

by Ctein

I hadn't planned on a third installment on this topic, but the level of interest in file recovery was so high that I decided a follow-up piece was an order.

I don't know why I should be surprised. Really, the worst thing that can happen to a photographer is losing their photos. That pretty well trumps any discussions of technique, aesthetics, or gear. If you don't have the photograph, all of that is pointless. So, for the record, this isn't a trivial matter, and this isn't a case of dwelling on minutia. If the subject really bores you, skip on to the next topic. Because, believe you me, it ain't the least bit boring when it happens to you. And it seems to have happened to way too many of us. 'Nough said? Back to the program in progress.

Following the many helpful suggestions I received from readers, I downloaded eight different image recovery programs to try out on my misbehaving card. One of them, Restorer 2000, wouldn't run at all on my system (Windows 2000, SP4) for some reason. Four of them couldn't find any photographs on the card: File Scavenger, FreeUndelete, Zero Assumption Recovery, and Lexar Image Rescue all failed to recover any files, no matter what search options I used.

Three of them, Smart Recovery, PhotoRec, and PhotoRescue, were able to recover 44 of the photos on the card. That's about two-thirds of them. One of those photos illustrates this column. All three programs recovered exactly the same files.

As a follow-up experiment, I formatted the card in the camera and set the data recovery programs loose on it, because it's been reported that in some cases recovery utilities do better with a "clean" file structure than a badly munched one. That wasn't true in this case; after I formatted of the card, none of the utilities found any photos to recover. But, hey, I got two-thirds of them back! I'm pretty damned happy.

The lesson to take home from this column is that if one recovery utility doesn't work for you, try a different one.  And don't give up until you've tried every one you can find.

Next column will be something entirely different, I promise.

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Ctein

Not Just a Virus

I don't want to go on and on about being sick, but as a follow-up to my earlier post about it, I should just say that what I have is definitely not "just a virus." It is, among other things, a "cancer scare," that peculiar condition of modern medical diagnosis in which you're told they don't know what you have, but what you have might kill you. Basically, what happened is that they found a mass on my lung. I've been sick for two weeks now, and have seen three doctors and undergone X-rays, blood tests, and a cat scan, but we appear to be nowhere close to an actual diagnosis that anyone is willing to stand behind. "Could be this, could be that," is what I've mostly gotten.

As I was having my cat scan interpreted last night, I asked the doctor if maybe getting an opinion from a pulmonary specialist with relative speediness might be a good idea, since lung cancer is still among the possible diagnoses. "It doesn't matter," he said brightly, "because if it's cancer, you're a goner anyway, so it wouldn't matter when you're seen." You know that much-overused word, "stunned"? We're always tossing that word casually around, calling things stunning as a way of saying "good." But last night, with that—€”well, I was stunned, let me tell ya.

Anyway, I'm getting some really good advice from a guy who is mainly a photo-buddy. I'm reminded again of something that I always try to remind myself of—€”that my readers might not know as much about photography as I do (although some do), but many of you have really impressive expertise in other areas. I've been thinking tonight about how lucky my friend Steve's regular patients are, to have a doctor as good as he is on their side. He's been advising me via long distance and at one remove, but he's really been a huge help to me through this whole ordeal.

The upshot is that I probably don't have cancer, and probably do have some sort of pneumonia. I've now secured an appointment with a pulmonary (lung) specialist for next Tuesday, and another pulmonary specialist—€”a friend of Steve's—€”is going to look over the CAT scan. So even if I'm not better by then, I'm hoping to have an actual diagnosis soon.

I'm still very weak, but not in pain, and every night I seem to sleep a little better. So although I'm not out of the woods yet, things are definitely looking up. I'm even going to go to some friends' for dinner tomorrow (with a go-ahead from the clinic doctor, of course), which feels like a big step.

Meanwhile, I have to tell you, the cloud formations I saw on the way back from the medical clinic yesterday were truly the tops. Conditions were just perfect—dramatic color variegation, excellent vividness, superb highlight differentiation, wonderful formations—just as photogenic as clouds ever get. I was sorry that I was too sick to drag a camera out of the house, but it gave me comfort that other photographers were out there, somewhere, photographing those spectacular skies. Really, really lovely. Whoever they were, I hope they got some nice pictures.

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Mike

Another Reason CDs Suck

A bit off-topic (but then, as you know, I've said many times in the past that music can't be off-topic for life)...here's a nice little explanation of recording compression, from FUNL. Might be of interest to you if you're not already way too familiar with the concept from listening to endless poor recordings of modern pop.

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Mike

What is Your Photographic Legacy?

By Gordon Lewis

In the latest issue of Black & White Photography magazine, Mike muses about the implications and effects of turning 50. Now, with his recent illness and his announcement of the deaths of Phil Davis and John Szarkowski, I find myself thinking about my own mortality—or, more specifically, my photographic legacy.

For the record, I’m 54 years old. I’ve been actively involved in shooting, developing and printing my own photographs since 1967. (Do the math.) I’ve also been a part-time pro photographer and writer. One result is that I’ve shot thousands of images. Most of them are stored in my office, either as negatives, slides, or prints, but I’ve got several hundreds more in digital form on my hard drive and CD-ROMs. I’m still taking pictures, so the total number of images is only going to increase.

The question I find myself thinking about a lot these days is what the hell to do with them. Without an answer to that question, what’s the point of simply adding to the total? I now shoot only for enjoyment, not for money. Thanks to my wife’s interest in scrapbooking, most of my family snapshots are now displayed on colorful cloth backgrounds with faux frames, next to paper cut-outs and trinkets. Love it or hate it, it’s a lot better than storing them all in a box somewhere.

But that’s exactly where most of my photos sit. Paper carton or hard drive, a box is a box. I’m only too willing to concede that only a few hundred of them would be of interest to anyone other than me. Perhaps only a few dozen would qualify as award-winners—but again, what’s the difference, if they’re all just sitting in a box? And what interest or value would they be to my wife and kids once I’m dead and buried? Is the whole point of this my own personal amusement, or am I serving some greater purpose?

This are not questions I expect you to answer for me. It is, however, one that you may want to ask yourselves.

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Gordon Lewis

Featured Comment by Charles Dunton: "I'll take a stab at the 'greater purpose' part. In 1898 my great-great-great-uncle took up photography after having been a collector of 'views' for a number of years. Since he lived in NYC, he joined the Camera Club of NY. He lived for only 3 more years, but during this period he was recognized by his peers as being an excellent photographer, appearing in juried shows in Philadelphia, Chicago, and London. When he died in 1901 (on a photo scouting trip to Canada) he left behind about 700 film and glass plate negatives. These, along with all of his other photo gear he left to his nephew. The nephew selected about 400 of these negatives and made cyanotype prints. He carefully numbered each image and on about 10% added a short caption. He then put the photos in a box, along with about 50 of his own, and took them to his uncle's father's home for safe keeping.

"They stayed in that cardboard box (not exactly archival) in the third floor attic (not exactly temperature controlled) of what later became my grandparents home for the next 85 years. Each summer during my youth, my sisters and I would spend a month with our grandparents and every so ofter I would sneak out the box and look at all the strange blue photos of places like Alaska, the Sierras, Yosemite, Yellowstone, fishing on the Nipigon River in Canada, tarpon fishing in Florida, and black sharecroppers living in Georgia and Florida. I wondered who these people were, and why my uncle took the photos and even where many were taken; but no one in the family knew anything anymore except for the few captions and who had taken them and that he belonged to the CCNY at one time.

"In 2003 the photos made their way to me from my sister. I couldn't stand not knowing any longer, so I scanned them and put them on the web and began an internet search that has taken me from England to California and Canada to Florida. Along the way I've corresponded with over 50 people who were able to add bits and pieces of information. I've learned a tremendous amount about the photographer uncle I never knew, the places he visited, and the people and sights he photographed. But there are so many more question I would love to ask him. I sure would love to find the journals he kept. Maybe someday I will.

"So, after that rather long-winded lead-in, here's the 'greater purpose' part. Take your favorite images, your most interesting images, your most personal images, and print them on archival paper with archival inks. Then write about them—pretend you're writing to the great-great-great-nephews (and nieces) you will never know—and then box them up and send them to someone in your family. In fact, make several copies and send them to several family members. You may never be famous to the rest of the world, but I can almost guarantee you will be famous to your descendants in the 22nd century who will marvel at what people and places looked like in the 20th century. (They will probably also marvel at these flat, 2-dimensional things we call prints, but that's another story.)

"If you've read this far and have any interest, you can look at my great-great-great-uncle's photos and read what little I've managed to learned about him and his photography. Good luck, and good shooting."

CameraGAS.com: 'Gear Acquisition Syndrome'

I've almost missed this, what with my illness and all, but you still have a few days left to post items for sale for free on the web's newest auction site dedicated to photographers. CameraGAS.com is an eBay substitute that is sworn to keep fees low, security high, and to fight hidden nickel-and-diming.

Security is a big issue. eBay tries to keep fraud as quiet as possible, of course, but the 'Cameras and Photo' area of eBay has one of the highest rates of fraud on all of eBay, and hence all the Web. Plus, as you might know, there are so many little charges on eBay that by the time the smoke has cleared, sellers have usually paid better than the proverbial pound of flesh for the privilege of using the service. CameraGAS intends to charge a straight $5.00 fee for transactions, with no add-ins and pile-ons.

You do have to register, and the site is still small (it just got under way recently). Head over and take a look—and if you have something to sell, you can still list it for free until I believe the 15th or so.

Oh—and spread the word. The more people know about the site, the better it will be.

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Mike

Phil Davis and John Szarkowski

Man, nothing but the sound of crickets chirping around here, for which I apologize. I'm still quite sick, and there have been some possible complications that are absorbing a lot of my time and concern.

Phil Davis
I'm sorry to note two recent deaths. First, I learned recently that my friend and one-time mentor Phil Davis passed away in June. Phil was one of the Contributing Editors of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques magazine when I arrived there as Editor. It wasn't long before he had become the de facto Technical Editor of the magazine, although he never accepted the title. He refused it for a typically Davisonian reason—he didn't want to be held accountable, even tangentially, for some of the technically less rigorous articles we published. Experimental rigor was always Phil's middle name. He ran endless experiments in his Ann Arbor studio/darkroom, often testing contentions and assertions that cropped up in the magazine or in online discussions on the old CompuServe Photography Forum. His own articles, most of which centered on aspects of applied sensitometry, were models of decorum and restraint, setting forth his experimental investigations with scholarly probity.

It was behind the scenes that things got more lively. For more than seven years Phil and I kept up a daily correspondence by email, beginning when I was Editor at PT and surviving my tenure there for several years. Phil was a very accomplished man—a pilot, University professor, textbook author, professional photographer serving the automobile industry, scientist—and he had strong opinions about a lot of things. Most fascinating were his accounts of the experiments he ran for his own edification, but wouldn't write up for the magazine. He once worked for weeks to prove to his own satisfaction (and mine, I might add) that the supposed benefits of pyro developers where wholly illusory, but he wouldn't publish the results because he couldn't prove them for more that a few conditions, and he didn't want to get caught up in controversy.

I hadn't heard from Phil much in recent years—he brought our correspondence to a close around the time he got sick with prostate cancer. He was certainly a remarkable individual, who always deserved to be better known in photographic circles than he was, a situation that came about because of his unyielding refusal to compromise or popularize. He was certainly one of the most interesting people I've ever known, and I will always be grateful for our friendship.

John Szarkowski
The New York Times obituary of former MoMA Photography Director John Szarkowski gets going with a bit of a howler, when it reports the pronunciation of his name as "Shar-COW-ski." That was not how he pronounced it to me. I first received an introduction to Mr. Szarkowski in 1988 from Walter Elisha of Springs Industries, a business school protegé of my grandfather's who was for a time the largest benefactor of the Photography Department, and met him for the first time at the Museum when I was barely out of photography school. From then on, a couple of times a year the phone would ring. "John shar-KOFF-ski here," he'd say, and off we'd go on a sleigh ride over whatever ground was consuming his interest at that moment. Most conversations would end with an assignment: he wanted to know if I could find something or someone for him, or some fact. He never did purchase a print of mine for the Museum or for any of the private collections he curated or helped curate, but I'm happy to say that I was able to bring several photographers to his attention whose work he did purchase.

I saw him for the last time when he spoke at his own show at the Milwaukee Art Museum a year or two ago. He gave a very charming talk, and the show—essentially the retrospective portfolio of a lifetime—gleamed in its burnished presentation. Although he seemed the picture of health at the time, it all had the air of nicely tied-off loose ends. A couple of months ago I heard he had suffered a massive stroke; those close to him expected him to die sooner than he did.

I have written about John Szarkowski several times, most notably in my essay "Photography's Quiet Giant." I hope those of you who haven't read that will take this occasion to do so.

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Mike

Picks and Nits in the Digital Age, Part 2

by Ctein

No matter how you pick at the data, those digital photos add up! A gigabyte of RAW files in a day isn't that hard to come by (though it's a very full day for me). When I get done messing around in Photoshop and adding layers and final corrections, I can easily end up with more than a DVD full of files a day. Writing duplicate copies to Kodak Gold media costs me $3–5. Pretty cheap compared to film, but anyone who says that storage is essentially free doesn't reckon on the multimegabytes of digital photography.

Which brings me to my next point: finding all those photos later. Another pleasant surprise—my old filing approach seems to work pretty well in this Brave New World! Namely, my traditional contact sheets and "catalog" numbers. A numbering scheme that dates back to my college days has worked well enough that I've never had need to revise it—(mmddyy-[roll#][strip letter][frame#]). E.g., (061607-#060) for the photo illustrating this column. I would claim genius on my part, but honestly I just got lucky. This scheme carries over just fine for digital. Photoshop makes proof sheets a snap. So, happy happy joy joy, one problem I don't have to deal with is a new filing system.

On the other hand...

Before they're archived and cataloged, bits are fragile.  I've already made the noob mistake of pulling a memory card out of my computer's card reader and sticking in a new one without dismounting the first card.  That leaves you with unreadable copies of the files on your computer and an unreadable card.  I've put the card aside while I'm looking for utility that can rebuild the file structure for me. Anyone out there wanna make some suggestions? Please??? The data is all there; it's the pointer structure that tells the computer which blocks of data are associated with which files that's messed up.

What really bothers me about this is not that I made that mistake; anyone who was worked seriously with IT for as many years as I have has done this more than once. It is a well-known "human failure mode" to forget to tell the computer to dismount a storage medium unit before physically removing that unit. The consequences are also well known. It's merely become more commonplace as ordinary end-users deal with removable storage.

What bugs me is that it would be trivially preventable: when you mount a chunk of storage, the OS should write a temporary ID byte to the device. Each time it accesses the device, it checks to see that the byte has the same value it did before. If it sees a different value (or no value), it doesn't do anything with the storage medium; instead it alerts you to reinsert the old unit so that it can be properly dismounted. When you tell the computer to dismount the storage unit, it erases the ID byte.

It's that simple. No unique identifier hard-coded into the storage medium (which would require bringing many standards groups and manufacturers into line and also freak the hell out of the paranoid). Just a small bit of code in the three major OS's and the problem would go away 99% of the time for 99.9% of the people out there. You'd think after 20+ years we could eliminate this particular failure mode, because it's not that hard to fix.

So why isn't it fixed? Beats me. Probably for the same reason there's no latch on the battery compartment on my camera and camera manufacturers can't ever be bothered to put a decent viewfinder in the camera. Because when designers aren't being brilliant, they can be just plain dumb.

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Ctein

Since Last We Spoke

The Fourth of July, and I'm recovering from what was basically a scalding, eye-gouging, stoat-stunning four-day-long headache. A quick trip to the hospital confirmed that it was not bacteriological—the way I felt, I could just envision black mold spores or something living and malevolent skating on my brain cells with razor blades or wreaking carnage in my lungs. The reason I went to the hospital is that I was interested—in a listless, detached sort of way—in the doctor's opinion as to what was in the process of killing me.

It was "just a virus." I was a little perturbed about that, or would have been if I were capable of stringing three thoughts together at the time. Just a virus? I think not. I know Just a Virus. Just a Virus has been an intermittent visitor of mine, over the years. And this, friends, was not just a virus; this was a giant, a paragon, a king among virii. A great marauding terminator virus; a rampaging overlord virus. I had chills so extreme my own shivering made me cramp, and after days of indescribable body and muscle aches, today I am sore, as if I'd been engaging in over-ambitious athletic activity for three days instead of laying in bed moaning.

The doctors and nurses, of course, were rather insolently dismissive of the intensity of my misery, as is typical of them. I don't blame them, actually. If you think about it, no one can possibly understand the misery of a person who is fond of comfort when he or she is in the grip of a bad virus. In fact,  although you most likely have been there a few times yourself, even memory won't do the trick. Think of it. There comes that moment in the course of any bad bout of flu when on the pulsing blackness of your worldview there appears with a ping a distant, faint light—about the size and faintness of Venus—that represents the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. That is, you realize with a happy shock that you actually feel slightly better, and the hope floods in that you might get steadily better still. But before that, no matter what the doctors say, you just aren't sure on the survival question, are you? Admit it. After you're well again, it's easy to be cavalier. You always have the benefit of hindsight. You know how it ended. When you're in the middle of it, on the other hand, you're never sure. Before that first glimmer of hope you have no such security. No one knows the misery of the flu sufferer—you, or I, or anyone—except the sufferer himself before that crucial corner is turned.

Well, anyway, although I'm better, but not better better. I still have a ways to go. But as you've deduced, I can type again; I actually turn the television on when I sit down in front of it; coughing doesn't make me feel like my skull is going to explode, and I don't wake up in agony within ten minutes of the Tylenol wearing off. The corner has been turned. I'll get back to some regular programming later today, when I'm no longer too weak to resist writing about Scooter Libby. Now it's time for yet more Tylenol and as long a nap as I can manage.

Oh, and Happy Fourth to you and yours, if you're American—and good health to you whether you're American or not.

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Mike

TOP Update

If things seem a little quiet around here lately it's because I've been very ill since last Friday evening. Please HOLD emails and calls for a few days while I get back on my feet, as I cannot spend time at the computer (comments are okay). Sorry for the interruption.

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Mike

Picks and Nits in the Digital Age

By Ctein

Thanks to Joshua's suggestion in response to my column on searching for a digital camera I wound up buying a Fuji Finepix S6000 with the money I got from selling my old 35mm compacts and some related odds and ends.

Clawing my way up the learning curve, there've been surprises. A few of them have been genuinely pleasant ones.

The biggest surprise is how satisfied I am with the picture quality. Overall it really is as good, if not better, than what I was getting from my old 35 mm compacts. I can make 8x10s that I'm very happy with if I use the low ISO settings, and I can obtain acceptable results at the high ISO settings if I'm willing to jump through a lot of Photoshop hoops.

Pretty spiffy for a $250 digital, I think! ISO 100, with the zoom at maximum (and cropped down from there).  The moon and Venus look pretty good, I dare say. Heavily massaged in Photoshop to maximize lunar detail and minimize grain and noise, but otherwise pretty much as the cameras saw it. Note that the non-round Venus is evidence of residual aberrations in the lens, not an actual partial phase.

In terms of exposure range, it's no contest; film wins. But, then, this is only a $250 camera and I've been a color negative photographer who did all his own custom printing. This is more like what I would expect from slides or standard prints. I'm getting used to it. On the other hand, my Fuji pictures are definitely less "grainy" than my 35 mm work. That holds pretty much at all ISO's; it's definitely the case at ISO 100.

Which brings me to my next point. Neat Image and Focus Magic are my friends! Anything I photograph gets run through a 25–30% noise filtering by Neat Image and a one-pixel-diameter sharpening with Focus Magic. Invariably this gives me photographs with less "grain" and more detail. Naturally I do everything in RAW; otherwise the quality at high ISOs would be unacceptable, and I'd lose a couple of stops exposure range at all speeds.

Even so, I get 75 pictures on a 1 GB xD card. Let's not forget that I'm the fellow who spent 10 days photographing in the Scottish Highlands and came back with only 118 photographs, one quarter of which were good enough to make dye transfer prints of. A handful of cards will hold a LOT of photos for the likes of me. I fiddle a lot before making a photograph.

Which brings me to my next point. Battery life. I fully believe the CIPA figures of 400 exposures for this camera...but for me an exposure might involve several reframes, a couple of checks of the histogram and adjustments of the exposure, and writing a lot of RAW data. I get barely better than one card-full of photographs on a set of rechargeable batteries; maybe 100 photos if I'm lucky. Since I can delete anything I don't like and reuse the card, I am making more photographs than I used to (though I still make precious few by most photographers' standards). I'm eating lots of batteries.

Which brings me to my next point. The battery compartment cap on the S6000 is on the bottom of the camera, is heavily spring-loaded, and has no locking catch. Bounce the camera around a bit and the cap will fly open dumping your batteries on the floor. After this happened to me twice in one day, I put a piece of adhesive tape over the cap, and that's all it took to keep it from sliding and popping open. I have trouble believing this problem never turned up in any field testing of the camera. You'd think adding a latch to the battery cover would be a no-brainer, wouldn't you? A big boo to Fuji for that one.

And while I'm on boos, let me deplore the eye-level electronic viewfinders in virtually every camera on the market, including this one. They simply suck. They don't have enough pixels to let you see anything useful in terms of composing a photograph. (Minolta once made a camera with a decent electronic viewfinder and then abandoned it in the next model for yet another sub-resolution, sub-marginal atrocity.) Come on folks, if you're not going to give us enough pixels in the viewfinder to get some idea of what we're looking at, then just do away with it entirely and save the money. As it stands, 99% of the time it is worthless. Let's do better.

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Ctein