Geology Field Trip/the importance of good input...

Natalie "made me" go out on her Geology society's field trip- wasn't sure what to expect of it to be fair, but I did get a good chance to play around with my Panasonic Lumix FZ-20 - and it's a cracking camera. Oh, and I found a shark's tooth- how cool is that?!

Back to my point (for today) - don't ever let anyone tell you that "a camera is a camera".

I guess having working in a camera shop way back (three years ago) when the digital era was peaking (as opposed to the steep decline it's in now as the snapshotters who originally drove people to digital compacts in the first place because they offered ultra-convenience (and brought back fun) to the art of photography are moving quickly onto mobile phones which provide the same power but with even more convenience) I suffer the photographer nerd's addiction to "pixel's aren't everything" and the "lens is king".

Having been out of the field for a bit though I thought going back to doing some "proper" photography would make me envious- I had a two-year-old digital camera from Panasonic (who were relatively new in the digital camera field back then) and everyone else was toting digital SLR's (Canon EOS's no less) and 12 megapixel compacts- making my mere five-million pixels sound positively low-res!

But the Panasonic still rocked - every shot it took (on automatic, with no fiddling or post tweaking) looked great to me - and whilst my camera was pretty bulky for a non-professional, non-SLR camera, I felt chuffed with the results.

The reason for it? Well, the image stabiliser makes every shot sharp and that helps a lot- most bad shots are those that are ruined by blur - typically the photographer's mistake (and don't let them tell you otherwise!) rather than the subjects- but the image stabiliser worked a treat- I can see why more and more manufacturers are picking this feature up and making it the norm.

But if I had to say what I think the real, main, reason that the shots looked great I'd have to say it was the lens. Sharp, bright, clear photos require light - lots of light- and that's what this one delivered. Decent wide angle, cracking zoom, these are the things that we can all easily assess with statistics and the things we spot straight away when we're looking at the reviews and tech-sheets- but what you really need are sample shots that show you the lens quality in the light and in the dark.

I'll post my pictures on the web in a wee bit - though I doubt many of you will be able to pick up the camera since it's long been discontinued (though I hear it's replacement is just as good). What I do hope though is that it'll encourage all to think not just about the pixels, but about the lens- I love technology's drive sometimes (in fact it drives me most of the time), but let's not forget that input is the real story- everything depends on the quality of input- be it software or hardware and that all boils down to the technology's interface with the world.

We've seen it in the I-phone- it captures input in a way people are enthralled by - touch- and gives highly rewarding output based on simple input. The bad "output" going around about FaceBook is based upon people's dislike of the high amount of "unconcious" input - the meta-data we unknowningly generate whilst browsing pictures of our friends and zombie-tagging each other - giving output in the form of advertising.

Good software, in my opinion, captures as much as it can that can be considered relevant and then a little bit more. But it also feeds back on that input with output that is measured and well processed. Some input is useless, can be thrown away, some can be used in really clever ways in the background to make the software better, but the really important stuff must be high quality- just like the lens on my camera. So make your input capture as good as you can - your program is only as good as the user's input.