Nikon D60: New Camera Kit

Posted by on Saturday, January 17, 2009

My new camera, the Nikon D60, arrived earlier this week on Tuesday. I was hoping to spend some time getting familiar with a few of the manual controls - but that didn't really happen. I've played with it some, but that's about it. I guess I'll be on full auto mode to begin with :)

I bought a pretty neat little case for it. It's got decent padding and no pockets on the front/back, which keeps it narrow for placing in my backpack. The aim being more comfortable on the hill... I picked up a filter too, to protect the lens from nasty people who think it's funny to spray someone holding a camera with snow, plus any other potential damage. Not sure it the fact that I bought I cheap one will make any difference; I'll find out soon with a couple of comparison shots, with and without the filter.

On that note, I took a photo of my new camcorder handle with both the new camera and my old compact. Take a look at the difference:

Compact.

SLR.

Probably not a great test for a number of reasons, but it's still a test. The D60 shot was taken using jpg, on normal quality (basic, normal, fine), at the medium size. The compact was on it's finest quality, at medium image size. Obvisouly I wasn't thinking too hard about doing a test here - actually, I was taking a picture of the handle and thought "I wonder what the same photo would look like on the compact"...

That said, I'd still say the Nikon kicks the compact's ass.

Of the few people-photos I've taken I'm pleased with the quality. I should have some good photos from this trip to Morzine, so right now, I'm not gonna spam my blog with photos of my mum and dad :)

One thing I have noticed whilst using the camera on auto mode is that the depth of field is really narrow... just a side thought. I'm gonna have to learn to use this camera properly, but in the mean time, the point and shoot results are great!

Labels: cameras, digital and electronic

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Camcorder Handle / Mount

Posted by on Friday, January 16, 2009

Last weekend I built a handle for my video camera. The main aim of the handle is to make the camera easier to hold whilst snowboarding, for follow cam shots. So the handle needs to be above the camera, and (close to) parallel to the direction that the camera is pointing. There'll be some other benefits too: using the camara with gloves on should be easier, and passing the camera to someone else ("hey, film me hitting this") should be less drop-prone too.

This isn't anything new, there're loads of people making small, custom handles. In fact, I was actually intending to re-use the design that my dad used a week earlier...

However, when I unpacked his handle and detached the camera, I thought the handle itself was too light: he'd used rather thin, aluminium. With my dad's design, he straps the handle to the camera at the top and bottom, which keeps it securely in place. But I didn't want this. I wanted the camera to sit on the mount, attached only by the tripod interface.

So I started looking for a nice bit of steel.

Once found, it was a little harder to work with, and it needed smoothing off some at the edges. But the end result is pretty close to what I'd visualised in the first place. Here are some photos:

Nice, thick steel.

Hard to manipulate.

Not quite the right shape.

Smoothing the corners and trimming the handle width.

Just about done.

The finished product.

It's definitely a substantial handle. Besides wanting it to feel solid, I also thought that the extra weight, providing it's not too heavy to prevent use, would help to produce more stable footage.

I'm not sure whether or not opting for a heavier material will make a noticable difference, or any difference at all for that matter, but I wanted to try it out.

When I recently looked into camera stabilisation I realised that I knew nothing about it (still don't know much), given some of my naive assumptions. I quickly found though, that some of the systems are based on a pivot (or gimbal?) plus some kind of heavy pendulum. I won't try to explain it, it you're interested, look it up.

Here are some links: make one yourself, one you can buy, a youtube clip (not exactly sure what's going on here, but you can see the effect).

I also found some related material, which you may find interesting: a still camera, tripod replacement for steady shots, 14 dollar steadycam and the somewhat cheesy, Levelcam.

So I was thinking that if I'm snowboarding down a hill, moving around a lot, with a light video camera in my hand, the camera is going to shake. If I make the camera heavier, it should shake less. Will it make a difference? I don't know, I'll have to wait and see. I kinda like it though...

Labels: cameras, digital and electronic

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