Back in the early days of this blog, I mulled over the idea of having a high-end digital compact camera to complement a DSLR that then was delivering very dusty images; that Canon EOS 10D was cleaned since then and comes in for occasional use to this day. That was nearly three years ago and a first generation Ricoh GR Digital was the item that then was catching my eye. At the time, I failed to justify spending that much money on such a thing and ended up acquiring a new Pentax K10D DSLR instead. The question that rattled about my head was this: what was the point of spending DSLR money on a compact camera? Its one that never really went away and comes to mind when you see the prices of interchangeable lens compacts like Olympus’ Pen and equivalent offerings from Panasonic and Ricoh (there, it’s interchangeable lens units rather than actual lenses).

The strongest counterpoint to the cost conundrum is the little matter of size. SLR (film or digital) cameras are sizeable things and there is a place for having something that drops into a pocket. It is that which has propelled me into taking delivery of a Canon PowerShot G11. It may need a good-sized pocket but, unless you are going out with no jacket, it shouldn’t be a problem most of the time. For those shorter sorties when I don’t fancy bringing an SLR out, it well-built and looks the business though some acclimatisation is in order to make the best of the knobs, buttons and menus. Nevertheless, the included manual will help with this process (there’s a paper quick start guide and more detailed documentation on CD).

The camera hasn’t seen extensive use just yet so here are a few early impressions. Firstly, there’s the matter of size: it’s even smaller than the first camera that I ever bought (more than fifteen years ago) and that was a Ricoh 35 mm compact film camera. That comparison is even more striking when you consider the feature sets. The Ricoh was a fixed 35 mm lens affair with things like date and time stamping, ISO choice and a nod towards scenic mode selection. In contrast, the much newer Canon is loaded with the sorts of things that normally are found almost exclusively on SLR’s, starting with its effective 28-140 mm focal length range.

Exposure modes such as manual, aperture priority and shutter priority complement scene-based modes and another for movies (not a concern of mine, it has to be said). As if that weren’t enough, there’s exposure compensation too. It came as a surprise to me to find a form of manual focussing included though it is not as convenient as turning a focussing ring on a lens. You can see the inbuilt flash above but there’s also a hotshoe and a place to attach a tripod too. Settings like white balance and file format are accessed using the Function/Set button with the lever underneath the shutter release button controlling the focal length of the lens. In addition, there’s also image stabilisation and that’s important when you’re using live view to compose a photo. Spot metering and focal point selection are other things that find their way into the package. Some may be excited by other things but exposure and focussing are essential for any photographic efforts.

An optical viewfinder is included and it has dioptre settings too but my first impressions are that live view though the rear screen trumps it and I see no need for such things on SLR’s. That also flips out from the camera body and can be rotated either for self-portraiture or for folding back in on the camera body for use like a non-articulated screen. Another use is with those occasions when the subject means holding the camera in positions that would be impossible with a conventional screen; holding the camera over your head or down low on the ground are the sorts of situations that come to mind.

Of course, there’s more there than those features that I have listed and the specifications on the Canon website are as good a place to start as any. So far, my only testing has been of the cursory checks variety and to make sure that the thing works properly. Still, this has given me more of a feel for the camera and how it operates. As you’d expect, high ISO settings are noisy but a bigger surprise was that the smallest aperture setting is f/8. Being used to SLR’s, I was expecting to get f/16 and its like on there but a spot of internet investigation showed that I should have been taking the size of the sensor into account with my expectations. Any trials so far have been in dull weather so I’d need to use it in a wider variety of conditions before giving it the sort of wider appraisal that you’d find in the likes Outdoor Photography (who liked it, it has to be said). For what it’s worth, I have found no major criticism so far though I cannot see it usurping my SLR’s but that never was the intention anyway.

Using a command line tool like ImageMagick for image processing may sound a really counter-intuitive thing to do but there’s no need to do everything on a case by case interactive basis. Image resizing and format conversion come to mind here. Helper programs are used behind the scenes too with Ghostscript being used to create Postscript files, for example.

The subject of helper programs brings me to an issue that has hampered me recently. While I am aware that there are tools like F-Spot available, I am also wont to use a combination of shell scripting (BASH & KSH), Perl and ImageMagick for organising my digital photos. My preference for using Raw camera files (DNG & CRW) means that ImageMagick cannot access these without a little helper. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s UFRaw. However, Jaunty Jackalope appears to have seen UFRaw updated to a version that is incompatible with the included version of ImageMagick (6.4.5 as opposed to 3.5.2 at the time of writing). The result is that the command issued by ImageMagick to UFRaw – issue the command man ufraw-batch to see the details – is not accepted by the included version of the latter, 0.15 if you’re interested. It seems that an older release of UFRaw accepted the output device ppm16 (16-bit PPM files) but this should now be specified as ppm for the output device and 16 for the output depth. In a nutshell, where the parameter output-type did the lot, you now need both output-type and output-depth.

I thought of decoupling things by using UFRaw to create 16-bit PPM files for processing by ImageMagick but to no avail. The identify command wouldn’t return the date on which the image was taken. I even changed the type to 8-bit JPEG’s with added EXIF information but no progress was made. In the end, a mad plan came to mind: creating a VirtualBox VM running Debian. The logic was that if Debian deserves its reputation for solidity, dependencies like ImageMagick and UFRaw shouldn’t be broken and I wasn’t wrong. To make it fly though, I needed to see if I could get Guest Additions installed on Debian. Out of the box, the supported kernel version must be at least 2.6.27 and Debian’s is 2.6.26 so additional work was on the cards. First, GCC, Make and the correct kernel header files need to be installed. Once those are in place, the installation works smoothly and a restart sets the goodies in motion. To make the necessary Shared folder to be available, a command like the following was executed:

mount -t vboxfs [Shared Folder name] [mount point]

Once that deed was done and ImageMagick instated, the processing that I have been doing for new DSLR images was reinstated. Ironically, Debian’s version of ImageMagick, 6.3.7, is even older than Ubuntu’s but it works and that’s the main thing. There is an Ubuntu bug report for this on Launchpad so I hope that it gets fixed at some point in the near future. However, that may mean awaiting 9.10 or Karmic Koala so I’m glad to have the workaround in the meantime.

Part of some recent “fooling” brought on by the investigation of what turned out to be a duff DVD writer was a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.10 on my main home PC. It might have brought on a certain amount of upheaval but it was nowhere near as severe as that following the same sort of thing with a Windows system. A few hours was all that was needed but the question as to whether it is better to do an upgrade every time a new Ubuntu release is unleashed on the world or to go for a complete virgin installation instead. With Ubuntu 9.04 in the offing, that question takes on a more immediate significance than it otherwise might do.

Various tricks make the whole reinstallation idea more palatable. For instance, many years of Windows usage have taught me the benefits of separating system and user files. The result is that my home directory lives on a different disk to my operating system files. Add to that the experience of being able to reuse that home drive across different Linux distros and even swapping from one distro to another becomes feasible. From various changes to my secondary machine, I can vouch that this works for Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian; the latter is what currently powers the said PC. You might have to user superuser powers to attend to ownership and access issues but the portability is certainly there and it applies anything kept on other disks too.

Naturally, there’s always the possibility of losing programs that you have had installed but losing the clutter can be liberating too. However, assembling a script made up up of one of more apt-get install commands can allow you to get many things back at a stroke. For example, I have a test web server (Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl) set up so this would be how I’d get everything back in place before beginning further configuration. It might be no bad idea to back up your collection of software sources either; I have yet to add all of the ones that I have been using back into Synaptic. Then there are closed source packages such as VirtualBox (yes, I know that there is an open source edition) and Adobe Reader. After reinstating the former, all my virtual machines were available for me to use again without further ado. Restoring the latter allowed me to grab version 9.1 (probably more secure anyway) and it inveigles itself into Firefox now too so the number of times that I need to go through the download shuffle before seeing the contents of a PDF are much reduced, though not completely eliminated by the Windows-like ability to see a PDF loaded in a browser tab. Moving from software to hardware for a moment, it looks like any bespoke actions such as my activating an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner need to be repeated but that was all that I needed to do. Getting things back into order is not so bad but you need to allow a modicum of time for this.

What I have discussed so far are what might be categorised as the common or garden aspects of a clean installation but I have seen some behaviours that make me wonder if the usual Ubuntu upgrade path is sufficiently complete in its refresh of your system. The counterpoint to all of this is that I may not have been looking for some of these things before now. That may apply to my noticing that DSLR support seems to be better with my Canon and Pentax cameras both being picked up and mounted for me as soon as they are connected to a PC, the caveat being that they are themselves powered on for this to happen. Another surprise that may be new is that the BBC iPlayer’s Listen Again works without further work from the user, a very useful development. It very clearly wasn’t that way before I carried out the invasive means. My previous tweaking might have prevented the in situ upgrade from doing its thing but I do see the point of not upsetting people’s systems with an overly aggressive update process, even if it means that some advances do not make themselves known.

So what’s my answer regarding which way to go once Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope appears? For sake of avoiding initial disruption, I’d be inclined to go down the Update Manager route first while reserving the right to do a fresh installation later on. All in all, I am left with the gut feeling is that the jury is still out on this one.

Despite the rampant progress of digital photography, I have continued to stick with film and sit astride the fence. That is something that I wish to continue but my most recent trips into the outdoors have seen me use my Pentax K10D exclusively. That, however, could be something to do with the subject matter. My most recent trot took me into what might be described as featureless moorland, a tricky subject to capture in the best way. So, possibly because of the lesser likelihood of success, I stuck with digital since any lack of success costs less. Previous trips took me out and about locally where I live and I seem to be more likely to use digital, possibly because I have been around the area a lot with my film camera anyway. Also, the vistas, as pleasant as they are, do not possess the drama of the likes of Highland Scotland, the English Lake District, or the mountainous parts North Wales.

That does lead to the impression that I am keeping film for the new and dramatic stuff and it may be true. it is, however, not entirely deliberate and I will continue to take both digital and film cameras with me on my excursions. My reason for taking a DSLR is that I want to put some photos into my posts on my outdoors blog and the world of digital easily speeds that process; my laggardness with getting films processed would add to the time taken too. And film? There is still a certain something about getting a print done for a photo album and the process does force me to print my photos, something that is not a compulsion in the digital world. There is also a greater feeling of permanance with film, a format that has been with us in its various guises for over a hundred years. With the pace of change in the world of computing, would the likes of DNG hold its own for that long?

The websites of Amateur Photographer and Tech.co.uk are good places to find out what is happening in the world of digital cameras, which is just as well given the recent camera launching frenzy. It all seemed to start off with Canon’s EOS D40 and EOS 1Ds Mark III. The former seemed to be a case of playing catch up but I still think that Canon should have used the opportunity to pull ahead, at least in the megapixel stakes; Sony is working on a 12 megapixel offering and could be about cause of 12 megapixel sensors becoming the norm for consumer digital SLR’s like they did with the 10 megapixel level. I realise that megapixels aren’t everything but it has seemed to go like that thus far. Playing catch up doesn’t apply to the 1Ds Mk III with its having a monster sensor resolution of 21 megapixels and, needless to say, the improvements to the favoured DSLR of landscape photographers don’t stop there. Nikon were also in the fray with new 12 MP offerings: D300 for the enthusiast and D3 for the professional. The sensor in the latter interestingly features a sensor that sits between full frame and the more usual APS-C sizes. Panasonic have also announced a new DSLR but a number of manufacturers have new digital compacts on the market too. All of the previous makers have something as does Olympus. It was amazing to see this all happening at once but I suppose that’s how it goes. IFA has been on over the last week but some launches preceded this; it’s usually something big like Photokina that results in this sort of thing…

Update: I have discovered since the Nikon’s D3 has a sensor sized in the full frame domain. It might be 36mmx23.9mm rather than 36mmx24mm but the FX format comes extremely close and the advent of full frame DSLR’s being purveyed by a number of manufacturers may be upon us.

On Saturday, I happened to be in Jessops and overheard a salesman emphatically state that you don’t buy a camera for its specifications but for the photos that it produces. While his tone of voice was a touch condescending and he seemed to be putting down a DSLR, he was essentially right. Nevertheless, the specifications do help you get the images and they have to be seen in that light. For instance, having on-board sensor cleaning may save you from having either to clean the thing yourself or send the camera away for the professionals to do the needful, a much safer option in my view. And there may be occasions where image stabilisation is very useful, low light wildlife photography for instance. Yes, there are features that I consider surplus to requirements like live viewing and movie capture and that is very much due to my buying cameras to make photos. The salesman in question would surely have agreed…

Sunday saw me head to the Lakeland Fells for some walking and a spot of testing of my new Pentax K10D. The details of the walk itself are not for here but for my hillwalking blog and that is where you will find them. While making my way from Crewe to Windermere, I perused the manual looking particularly for information pertaining to functions that I actually use (I should really have done this beforehand but distractions meant that I hadn’t got around to it). I had to wade through something designed for a new SLR user before I got to what I consider the important stuff. Though this may be a bit irritating, I can understand and accept why they do it this way; we were all new users once and they are hardly likely to want to know about things like aperture priority, raw file capture, ISO control and such like straight away.

What do I think of it then? Let’s start with first impressions. It is definitely smaller than the Canon EOS 10D it accompanies in my possession. That said, it is not too small and there is a decent grip hosting the shutter release button and the camera on/off switch. It also feels well-assembled and reassuringly weighty, an important consideration given that it will see the outdoors a lot. A discussion of the features most relevant to me follows.

On the subject of switching on and off, the camera is set to go into a sleep mode after a second of inactivity but it reawakens quickly when needed, the trigger being half-depression of the shutter release button. In fact, the camera does reawaken much faster than my Canon as it happens and where the delay is a constant source of some irritation. It might sound strange but the on/off switch is also used to activate the depth of field preview, something that no SLR should not have. The location may be unusual but maybe the designers thought that having shutter release and depth of field preview next to each was a logical way to do it. From a camera operation point of view, there is certainly something to that way of thinking. Behind the shutter release, you’ll find the a screen that is a reminder of film SLR’s and it conveys information such as battery life, number of exposures remaining on the card and exposure details (aperture & shutter speed).

Staying on the subject of screens, the one on the back of the camera is larger than that on the Canon. As is customary for these, it allows replay of photos taken and access to the various menus required to control the camera’s operation. In comparison to the Canon, which is essentially a one menu affair with a thumbwheel controlling scrolling and an OK button at its centre to perform operations, the Pentax has a more elaborate system of submenus: one each for recording, playback and set-up. The playback menu is where I found the setting that makes the camera highlight areas of underexposure and overexposure during image playback. This is something that I missed with respect to the Canon until I happened upon it. Camera cleaning is located on the set-up menu and the camera is now set to clean the sensor every time that it is turned on. Why this is not enabled by default is a little beyond me but the designers might have thought that a vibration from the camera on turning it on could have resulted in a load of support calls. The same submenu also hosts memory card formatting. The recording submenu is where I set the camera to deliver RAW DNG files, an Adobe innovation, rather than the default JPEG’s. There are other opitons like RAW PEF files, Pentax’s own format, or RAW and JPEG simultaneously but my choice reflects my workflow in Photoshop Elements; I have yet to stop the said software editing the DNG files, however. With all these options, it is fortunate that there is a navigation wheel whose operation uses arrow buttons to get about. While on the subject of the back screen, there are further settings that are accessed with the Fn button rather than the Menu one. These include ISO, white balance, shooting mode (single, continuous, timed and so on) and flash. The only setting that I changed out of this lot was to set the ISO to 400; I prefer to feel that I am in control.

Returning to the camera’s top plate, the exposure mode dial is on the left hand side, which is no hardship to me as this is in the same place as on the Canon. There are no scene modes but the available exposure modes are more than sufficient: fully automatic, program, sensitivity priority, shutter priority, aperture priority, shutter and aperture priority, manual, bulb and external flash synchronisation. A few of these need a spot of explaining. Sensitivity priority is no one on me but it is a consequence of the ability of DSLR’s to offer a range of ISO settings; the aperture and the shutter speed are varied according to the ISO setting. Shutter and aperture priority is like manual exposure and is the inverse of sensitivity priority: set both aperture and shutter speed, and the camera will vary the ISO setting. Both of the foregoing assume that you let the camera set the ISO but my setting the thing myself may have put put paid to these functions. Shutter priority and aperture priority are, as far as I can tell, their usual selves. For all exposure modes, the thumbwheels at the front and back of the shutter release handgrip set apertures and shutter speeds where appropriate and this arrangement works well.

Mounting on the same column as the exposure dial the metering mode selector and here is where I see more options than my Canon, which has only full and partial multi-segment metering. With the Pentax, you get spot and centre-weighted metering in addition to the default multi-segmented variety. spot metering is definitely very useful but capturing the reading is a multitasking affair: half pressing the shutter button and fulling pressing the AE lock one at the same time. In contrast, Canon’s partial metering is a more convenient single button operation meter and retain facility. Pentax would do well to learn from this.

The focussing mode selector is found on the left of the body next to the lens coupling. I am used to having this on the lenses themselves so this is a new arrangement for me and one to which I can easily become accustomed. In fact, it is easy to find it while composing a picture. The modes themselves are manual focus, one-time autofocus and continuous autofocus; the last of these is for focussing on moving objects.

I could go further, perhaps overboard, with a discussion of the features of this camera but I draw a line at what’s here. Yes, it is useful to set the focussing point and activate image stabilisation but the above are what matter to me and its performance in the photo making department is the most important aspect. That neatly brings me to my appraisal of how it performs. With inspection of the first few images on the review screen, I was a little disappointed to see how dark the foreground was in comparison to the sky. When I brought everything home as I always do, I found that things weren’t necessarily as they appeared in the field. The Pentax more usefully offers histogram review and highlighting of any areas that are either underexposed or overexposed. It is these functions that I will be using in reshooting decisions while out and about with the Pentax and the same can be said for how I currently use the Canon. In fast changing lighting, the AE lock technique was a bit irritating but I am sure that I will get better at it. The autofocus doesn’t always lock onto the subject, especially in tricky lighting, so manual focussing is a definite necessity and is more useful more for landscape photography, in fact. Nevertheless, the autofocus did do well most of the time and my Sigma lenses have done worse things on me. All in all, I am happy with the K10D and will continue to use it. I have got some decent photos from my excursion and that, as that Jessops salesman would agree, is the main point of a camera.