Winter's Last Gasp / EP-L2 Experimentation

It's a snowy day out in Buffalo, the last gasp of our very long thorough winter before our slow glorious spring begins, so we're passing the time with camera testing. I took the EP-L2 home the other night because I wanted to see how the video worked. You can be taking a video and take a still picture in the middle, then resume video recording. I wanted to see how long a pause there was to take the picture.
Unfortunately there's nothing particularly exciting going on in my house after 10pm, so you all get treated to some rather boring video of my cat. (I assure you, the cat herself is not boring, merely uninterested in being a film star even though she's named for one. Alas I do not have the next feline Internet sensation on my hands.)
So, I present to you the lovely Chita Rivera, under the unattractive lights of my kitchen.
First video:

Then I pressed the shutter button to interrupt the video with a picture:

And then the video resumed:

I chose this sequence because she was bored with me and was lashing her tail, so you could see the motion. The pause wasn't long; I estimated it at about a second and a half to maybe three seconds. So, for a reasonably static subject, you'd notice nothing; for sports or fast motion it would probably be annoying. You'd have to use this feature strategically. But it is appreciably faster than stopping recording manually to take a photo, and then putting it back into video mode and resuming.

Notice everything's kind of an unattractive orange. I didn't post-process anything, for journalistic integrity's, and laziness's, sake. Later I experimented with the EP-L2's white balance a bit, so scroll down if you want to see less hideous pictures. I normally shoot with a Nikon D300, in raw, precisely because I'm terrible at picking an appropriate automatic white balance; Olympus's user-friendly terms like "express motion" and "blur background," while not hard to figure out, are definitely aimed more squarely at the upcoming-from-point-and-shoot market than at the coming-down-from-enormous-DSLR crowd. But they're right in that you have to woo the former a little more aggressively. I was captivated enough by how damn nifty it was to have a camera so tiny that I was willing to put up with the slightly-cutesy controls. Hey-- it has an aperture priority. And it fits into my little purse. (I carry my D300 in a purse, too, but I won't lie, it's an enormous purse.)
For the record, white balance on the Olympus PEN cameras is called "change color image", and is a user-friendly slider between blue and yellow.
I also played a little bit with the art filters. I'd definitely use them more if I were somewhere with, you know, interesting objects or colors. As it is, a small gray cat on a yellow linoleum floor isn't particularly striking when photographed in Pop Art or Dramatic Tones. But here she is in the Black And White filter:

I would probably overuse the heck out of that one. I always tell customers not to shoot in black and white, shoot in color and then post-process, because if you change your mind you can't go back and add color. But I know people don't really want to do that. For the vast majority of people who don't live their lives tethered to Lightroom, having really fun easy-to-use in-camera editing is actually a pretty great feature, and having easy-to-use, obvious-how-to-get-out-of-them-afterward filters you can shoot with is definitely a lot more likely to get your average point-and-shoot graduate shooting more adventurously than the nebulous promise of "post-processing".

I expect to have a series of much more attractive sample shots from a PEN when our district manager gets back from his vacation. He promised he'd use his shiny new camera, and more interestingly, let his clever 8-year-old daughter use it. I'm very interested to see how an intelligent small girl does with a camera like that-- will she puzzle through the features, or shoot in auto?
Mostly I'd just like to see pictures of something besides snow and my kitchen, I confess. (He's in Arizona with his family. I hear it's pretty there this time of year. Don't get me wrong. I like winter, that's why I live in Buffalo. But it's almost March and I miss the sun, just a little bit.)
Here, as a parting shot, is a video of pouring water. It seemed like that might give a decent idea of the framerate of the video. I like how you can see me decide that it's only water and that counter could use a wipedown anyway.


I got the white balance a little better for these shots.



EDITED TO ADD: You guys I didn't know! There's a $50 instant savings on this camera through the end of February! Awesome!

cleaning out the closet

A lot of people clean out closets this time of year, it seems. Or maybe it's just when they bring their old pictures in. And I admit, people's really old photos are probably my favorite thing about this job. I know we're a camera store, but I'm not just interested in the latest thing. I was raised by historians (here's a bit of trivia: my mother and Stephen's mother attended the same graduate program to study museum curation), and so there's nothing I love more than delving into history. Books are nice and all, but as students of history will know, they are secondary source material, collected and edited together. People's old photos? Those are primary source material. First-hand records of history as it was lived.

Last year a man brought in a box of uncut rolls of 35mm film, black and white, to be scanned into digital format. I wasn't eager to tackle the project until I unrolled the first one, peered at it, and realized... these were someone's hand-loaded, home-developed family photos from the USSR in the 1960s. I know nothing about that place at that time. There were no notes I could read, no context, but most of the photos were of a beautiful young woman and a little boy, who began as an infant and grew into childhood. There were family trips to parks, ice cream cones, strollers, enormous family gatherings at holiday tables. It was fascinating. (I think the little boy must have been the man who brought them in, and the young woman his mother, who would be quite elderly now. She really was a beauty, in those early pictures.)
Last month a man brought in a large photograph of a graduating class at an Indian university in the 1930s. We had to re-type the caption, as it was too blurred to scan. We had two employees double-check the spelling on the totally foreign (to us) names of the students.
Last week an elderly African-American woman brought in a handful of medium-format negatives. They were mostly photos of herself, as a young woman, posing in a fashionable 60s sheath dress, posing by a prize rosebush, posing proudly in a nursing uniform with a certificate next to a beaming older woman-- almost certainly her mother. There were children in home-made pinafores with rick-rack trim and crinoline skirts, posing on probably their first day of school, on the porch of a modest house. A crowd, a family most likely, around a table bearing what looked like a birthday cake. It was a mute narrative of what life was like in our city for African-Americans around the time of the Civil Rights movement.
Yesterday a woman brought in a wedding album that was her mother's; the bridesmaids' hats dated the photos pretty conclusively to just after World War II. Look at the men's suits; the bride's dress with lace sleeves and a satin sweetheart bodice-- how happy the guests looked in the receiving line-- and the hats, oh, the hats.

These are worlds I'd never have any access to otherwise, not in such an immediate way; I wasn't born until the end of the 70s, and my family is white and from New York City. I spend way longer on these orders than I should, looking at the details of the costume, of the wallpaper, what they're eating, how they lived. This is history. It's priceless.

Do you have any of these treasures locked away in a box somewhere? Get them digitized! Share them with your relatives! And preserve them, for our own history is the richer, the more primary sources, firsthand accounts, are preserved and shared with the world. We can digitize slides, negatives, prints, daguerreotypes, tintypes, you name it, whatever size. And once they're digitized, they can be reprinted. (Give all your cousins a copy of Grandma's wedding photo!)
We can even transfer 8mm film to DVDs. (And, for more recent history, VHS tapes too!)
Look through your closets. Find those old boxes. Don't let them get moldy, scratched, dusty; don't let them disintegrate until there's not enough left to tell what the picture was. It's your history, your heritage. Everyone is a little richer for seeing it, for learning from it-- especially you.

Bring A Friend For Free!

For the month of February, we're offering a special on classes-- buy one admission, get one for free. That means you can bring a friend along, at no extra charge! (You also could buy two classes in a series, for yourself, if you're less socially-inclined, but BOGO wasn't as fun a tagline as Bring A Friend For Free.)

This is good at any of our Buffalo locations!
So come on down and bring a friend!
Class schedules, sorted by location, are listed on the website, along with more information about the classes we offer.

New Olympus EP-L2

We got a shipment of the new Olympus EP-L2 cameras in, charged up the battery, and took some test shots. It's a good thing we got them when we did-- our Philly locations are all closed because of their foul weather, while up here in Buffalo we're basking in our sunny 29-degree weather. (Isn't it funny how in the depths of January 32 degrees seems so eerily warm?)

Here's a pair of test shots. The subject is a pointsettia plant gifted to the Transit Rd store for the 2009 season, which has survived over a full year and is, somewhat tardily, slowly starting to bloom again. (Did you know those things were perennials? I did! I've been feeding it coffee. Yes really. If it dies, we have nothing to take pictures of.)
Both shot in JPG, high quality, on the P setting. (By my lovely and talented associate Sarah.)
EP-L1:


Compared with the EP-L2:


The EP-L2 is redesigned, with a moderately smaller body and a significantly smaller lens. It's still a kit 14-40, but it's much smaller and smoother in operation. It focuses faster, too.
Sarah preferred the EP-L1 still; its in-camera image processing gives a sharper, more vividly-colored image, while the 2 yielded a softer, brighter picture in identical settings. But we haven't tried out the video or subjected it to any kind of rigorous testing yet, so the jury's still out. (We can't video a pointsettia plant. It's really not very interesting. The only thing interesting about Transit Rd. is the traffic, and we're not going to go play in traffic for your amusement!)

The best thing to do is to come down to one of our Buffalo stores, which are open because we have nice weather, and check it out for yourself!

Winter Blues

Chase away the winter blues with a little continuing education! We have new class schedules posted on the website-- remember, we've got separate schedules for the Transit and Delaware locations, so you don't get confused and show up at the wrong time.
We've also begun offering classes in our Pennsylvania locations, for those loyal Jack's Cameras customers!
We're continuing the basic classes, one each for compact and DSLR cameras, and offering those about once weekly. But we're expanding the advanced offerings. There's one on Understanding Lenses, which gives DSLR users really practical insights into which of the bewildering array of available lenses is most likely to meet their needs. There's one on Amateur Sports, which are a popular genre of photography and one of the most challenging you can take up. And there's one called "You've Got Your Pictures, Now What?" that deals with the perennial question of what on earth to do once you've mastered the use of your camera.

Here in Buffalo we're dealing with the perfectly normal weather one expects this kind of year. Thing is, after the holidays, we're all pretty ready for the winter to be over! February is always the longest month, despite having fewer days than most. One thing we did at both Buffalo stores was the "Two Minute Challenge," where each employee was handed the same camera and given two minutes to go outside and take the best picture they could. We haven't judged it yet, but that'll be a fun pastime-- see how different everyone's take on our mundane surroundings is.
I think I got the best one-- tire tracks in the snow-- but Jeff managed to get an action shot of a squirrel, so... It's some proof that winter can be beautiful. We'll see how the voting goes! And I'll be sure to put the pics up here, or maybe on Facebook, when we're done.

The Myth Of "Great Deals"

One of my friends, along with many many others this holiday season, has engaged me at great length in conversations about cameras, asking my advice, only to turn around and make a purchase somewhere else. I needled him about this, I thought rather justifiably; I'm spending all this time advising you on cameras, and I know you're going to come to me with it later asking more about how to use it, so why don't you buy it from me?
And this person said, and I quote, "Small shops can't compete with online prices."

Needless to say, this isn't a friend I'm speaking to currently (let him figure out how to use his camera on his own first, then we can make up), but if someone who I considered a friend felt able to say this to me, then the rest of you (most of whom don't know me; hi, I'm Bridget, I work at Store 406 on Transit Rd) are all thinking it. Customers coming into the store have said things like "I'd rather spend a little extra and know I can get the camera looked at if I have questions!"

But it's not true. We sell online. We sell online competitively. Most of our prices are the minimum advertised price set by the manufacturer and adhered to by every one of their licensed dealers. Yes, that means Best Buy. Yes, that means Wal-Mart. Yes, that means Amazon. (We sell on Amazon. The link's to the right of this page.)

The camera he bought, we had for $50 cheaper, in store, no shipping. We also had a better deal on a memory card to go with it.

So our prices aren't any higher. Where this idea comes from, I don't know.

If you find it for a better price online, print out the page showing it in the shopping cart at that price. Then go to Google and type in the shop name, and look for Reseller Ratings.com. That's what we do, in the store. If it turns out the shop in question really is on the up-and-up, then bring the page in to us, and we'll match the price. I promise you, about 19 times out of 20, if the price is really really good, it's because you're not actually going to get what you think you're going to get. There are a million and one scams on the Internet, and even more of them this time of year. If it's good, we'll match it! If it's not good, then we can't afford to match it, because we're not going to sell you the wrong camera or give you an illegally imported gray-market no-warranty camera or take the included charger and battery out of the box and sell them to you separately or insist you buy some shady "extended warranty" or we'll cancel the sale, or any of those things that make those "incredible online deals" worth exactly what you pay for them.

So really. You trust us for camera advice. Trust us to sell you your cameras. Or we won't be here indefinitely to keep answering your questions.


And if you did buy a camera somewhere else after benefitting from all our advice and expertise, c'mon. Buy a camera class or get your pictures developed here. Support a local business; reward those who try harder to serve you; keep the knowledge base local.

Whew!

So we survived Black Friday. Still holding strong with lots of stock in many items, including a new shipment of memory cards and batteries that came in midday yesterday. We're running a bit low on a couple of colors of some cameras, but Nikon USA has assured us that stocks are good and whatever we order now ought to be in before Christmas. So if you want to get the super-low Black Friday prices on some of these hot items, give us a prepaid order so we can get it in to Nikon before the cutoff date, and you'll get your gifts in time for the holidays.
We've got a lot of good deals left, though, and tons of whatever you're looking for in stock.
So avoid the big-box stores-- don't get trampled, don't get stuck in a line for an hour only to realize it's the bathroom, not the checkout, and as a huge side bonus, get actual intelligent answers to your questions, from real live human beings. Come give us a shot.
Apparently some people are calling it Small Business Saturday, to follow Black Friday-- come support a small local business.
And for those of you who stopped by yesterday, thank you!