My new Fujifilm Finepix S100fs

I while ago I sold / gave my old camera, a Fujifilm Finepix S5000 to my father. It had served me well and he needed a camera for a once in a lifetime holiday to America. I took it to Africa a couple of years ago and got some awesome shots. It never let me down, so when he said he wanted a good camera I gave him one I knew he could rely on. And it took good photos for him too.

But since them I’ve been without a ‘big’ camera. I’ve got my Fujifim Finepix Z3 (can you spot the pattern here?) and its fine for snapshots at parties etc. but it’s not something that you can really use for doing creative stuff.

So last weekend I went to buy a new camera. I had seen a newer version of the one I had but with a much longer zoom (18x!!) and I was determined to have it. It was only $600 which I thought was an absolute bargain.

So I bought the S8000sd from Wellington Photographic Supplies and raced home eager to try it out. The day was not really suited to photography, rainy and dark. But my old camera worked quite well in low light conditions, so I was not too bothered.

I took some test shots out my front door of tress and flowers and stuff, and some inside both with the flash and without. Basically I was having a ball zooming in on things and clicking and zooming back out again and playing with the settings.

Then came the moment of truth. I downloaded the photos onto my computer to see what they looked like.

I was stunned.

They were absolutely crap. Every one of them. They looked like cellphone pictures. All of them were grainy, the focus wasn’t right, they were overexposed…. It was very disappointing.

At that stage it was about 2.30pm. The shop closed at 4pm. So I jumped back in my car and raced back to the shop.

I have to say they were quite helpful when I explained the problem. The sales assistant took some photos with my camera and printed them out. She agreed that they were not good. So they grabbed another camera and tried that one. The results were a little better but still much the same as a cellphone picture. So then we went outside nd took a picture of a street sign with the offending camera and the S100. Both shots were printed out for comparison.

The difference was startling.

It was one thing to see the grainy photos on their own, but to see the same picture side by side with a crisp clear correct photo really told the tale.

I have to say, as you’ve probably guessed, I’m a real fan of the Finepix cameras. They have wonderful colours, are reliable, useable and generally fun to use. So when the camera I had bought let me down so badly I was quite surprised.

So in the end I swapped the S8000sd for the S100fs. It cost me an extra $650, which I didn’t really want to spend right at that moment. But at least now I know I’ve got a good camera.

I took a bunch of test shots when I got home (just to make sure) and the results were exactly what I expected. Much better.

I have since played with the features a bit including the 14x zoom and my all time favourite, manual focus. It was the only thing about my old S5000 that I didn’t like. But the S100 has a proper manual focus and a manual zoom which is just awesome.

So I guess the lesson in all this, is that when you are looking at buying a digital camera take some photos with it in the shop before you part with your money and get them printed out. It might cost you an extra couple of dollars (if the shop is a bit stingy) but at least you will know what you are letting yourself in for. And if you do take your camera home without testing it and then find it is not as good as you hoped, take it back. Most places will at least try to help. You’ve spent a lot of money to buy the camera you want to make sure you get one that you will enjoy using, and that you will enjoy showing the results to all your friends, family and anyone else you can rope in.

The war with Drupal

I’ve been building a site using the Drupal CMS over the last week.

The build was not helped by me having a cold and feeling miserable. And I have to say that for the first couple of days it was a real struggle.

I knew a little about Drupal from a familiarisation play around a little while ago, and that really helped me get going. But I found that in order to do what I wanted I had to download and install a bunch of modules.

Another problem I’m faced with is the nature of the site, which is largely brochure-ware. While Drupal can handle a site like that, that’s not really what it was designed for. So that means doing a bunch of customisation to get things working the way the client wants.

As I say, I really struggled early on to get it all working the way I wanted, until Wednesday.

After reading lots of tutorials and trying all sorts of different strategies, I finally figured it out. The big secret to getting things working is the Views module. And this is not part of the core build!! But using the Views module let me display the dynamic content on pages and in widgets that I wanted. And once I’d figured this out, it was all on for young and old. In no time at all I had most of the important parts of the site built and operating exactly the way it was supposed to. I only had to add one line of code to the template file to get a specific layout, and apart from that the site is all built with standard module code.

So if you’re looking at building a site with Drupal and you’re struggling to get it to work the way you want, check out the Views module and combine it with the Blocks to put the content you want in the places you want. Once you get that sorted you’ll be surprised at just how easy it can be to get a site up and running.