I’m still more miss than hit with my new camera. The autofocus is fast, but not always accurate, and the autoexposure is inconsistent. I keep forgetting to clear modes (macro, manual focus, exposure compensation) that I’d set for special situations. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the LCD review function is so slow, and having auto-review turned on slows your picture save time and eats your batteries. Also, you can’t use the remote with the monitor on, for some reason, and if you turn the monitor on, then the drive mode that you can use the remote with is cleared. All of this is very frustrating to me.
Still, the E-10 is about a hundred times better than my Powershot A20, and I’m learning to work around the annoying bits and take advantage of the good stuff it offers. I got some pretty cool pics after work, a couple on South Congress, a few more around sunset and at night last night on Town Lake and Downtown, and even a couple portraits of the Kitty Cats. I’m slowly learning to post only one pic that tells the same story, instead of all the pics that I think look good, and I think that if I only ever post my really good pics, then nobody will know that I take bad ones.
I also got some pics that aren’t too bad at a Travis County park at Windy Point on Sunday. These are here not so much for artistic value as for my friends, and I didn’t take all of them.
I also got a Polarizing filter that I forsee vastly improving my nature shots. Click “Read More” below to see some explanation and samples.
This filter can add some saturation to sky that is washed out, and remove glare from water, and, more importanty, foliage. This will help a lot with the overexposure and washout problems I had, for instance, at the botanical gardens the other day. Here are some comparison pics. The polarizing filter is on all of them, but on the left tuned to its least effective angle, on the right to its most effective:
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As you can see, it sometimes has a pretty dramatic effect, and sometimes completely alters the autoexposure behavior for the better.
