Tag Archive for 'cameras'

This past Wednesday (2006/03/22) one of the Administrators asked me to take some pictures of the school. This week was Foreign Language Week, so the halls were decorated, a few students dressed up, and the cafeteria menu featured tasty foods from around the world.

With my Rebel XT in hand (actually on a tripod), I set out trying to “capture” the spirit of Foreign Language week. While making my way around the building I stopped by the Chapel, which has always proven difficult to photograph (for me at least) because of the low light.

I wanted to try something… First I reset the camera to default settings, switched it to Auto, made sure the tripod was where I wanted it, and framed the picture. As you can see, the result was very disappointing:

I could immediately tell from the preview that this wasn’t going to work. Okay okay, I can hear you screaming at me: “You have a DSLR and you are shooting under Auto!?!?” Settle down, it was just and experiment.

Along for the ride was my trusty 3.2 megapixel Nikon point-and-shoot Coolpix 3100. I also set it to Auto and took a picture. From first glance at the preview, this picture out did the $900 Rebel!!! Remember now, I was only going off the little previews the cameras were offering.

Knowing full well I couldn’t get away with taking a photo of the Chapel on Auto with the Rebel, I set the camera to manual, made the necessary adjustments and took the picture:

The preview was worth a thousand words. :D

After making it around the school I downloaded the images and looked at what I had captured, and immediately wanted to compare the Chapel photos.

The Rebel XT on Auto was terrible, so was the Nikon (but at least you could see part of the Chapel)… The Rebel XT on Manual was just right, perfectly capturing the brown hues of the wood.

Conclusions: The Rebel XT when used properly, can capture true to life photographs as it should; and having a point-and-shoot (obviously they have improved picture quality since mine was released) is handy when you don’t have time to set up a tripod. You can’t really compare a point-and-shoot to a Digital SRL can you? Please don’t email me saying you can, its a rhetorical question. :p

Reposted from my previous blog.