Testing, Testing........One, Two, Seven

Regular readers will hopefully remember that back in the summer, I made the decision to buy a compact Nikon camera to basically replace my Canon dSLR and bulky 200mm zoom lens combo. Despite being a compact, the Nikon has over twice the zoom range and having tested it out on the France/Spain trip, I decided to take it here to Florida as my sole camera.

Given that the Canon 200mm zoom was a much superior quality lens, the decision may turn out to be a mistake.

Yesterday it was time to give the compact another test by taking some photos around the park as I've done so many times before. So after a bit of a chillout around the house in the morning, I went for a short bike ride. As you get older and less flexible, everyone should have a short bike as they are much easier to get on and off ! Har, har.

I headed to the lake and despite not having the tripod, took a few photos and here are the results. I'm relatively happy with them but know I can 'do better' with a tripod as at extreme zoom, sharpness can be an issue when the camera is hand held. The fact that the dSLR and zoom lens were heavy, actually made keeping them steady a lot easier than doing the same with a compact. But as simple snaps, they'll do.

Over the years, I've taken many photos of the wildlife around the park and here are a couple of bird shots that again aren't as high quality as ones taken with the dSLR. I knew this would be the case but I'm hoping that the other features of the compact will justify make my decision to bring it. If nothing else, being able to keep it in my breast pocket will be a huge bonus.

I tried that with the Canon and 200mm lens and it just didn't work so well !

Finally here is a photo highlighting one of the reasons why I chose the Nikon Coolpix S9100 as my compact camera. The 'Easy Panorama' feature means no more stitching individual photos together to create a panorama. Although I'd had success doing this in the past, each photo can have slightly different exposure levels as you pan around and so you can usually tell that stitching was done.

With the S9100, I simply hold down the shutter button and pan around and depending on the setting, I can take an 180 or 360 degree panorama in one sweep. Uniformly exposed and seamlessly saved in camera.

I've yet to take an easy panorama utilising my tripod so remember the one above was hand held. As such I wasn't perfectly steady during the pan and so the depth of the image has been affected as the software has to perform a crop in order to get the scene level across the 180 degrees.

Again I think it's a decent example and certainly gives a good impression of the view I was seeing from the end of the pier. Remember that as always, my photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and this is especially appropriate with the panorama one.

So I think the current report on the camera should read.........off to a reasonable start but could do better.