Everyday Blip

Thoroughly uninspired by the offering on TV yesterday evening, I set about experimenting with the camera and a handful of everyday objects.

My Fujiflim HS10 is a great bridge camera, with lots of cleverness built in and a whopping 30x zoom fixed lens. It doubles as s a 1080p HD video camera and a 1000 fps slo-mo camera too!

With all this functionality though, there have to be compromises, in a jack of all trades, master of none kind of way. Worryingly the camera suffers from an identity crisis. 'Am I a HS10 or HS11 or both?' *sighs* 'I can't decide, I'll just tell the world that I'm both - you decide.'

The lens performance is average, but this is overcome by software limitations on the available aperture (f-stop). You're guaranteed a reasonable result, but not necessarily the depth of field.

Most annoyingly though, in spite of all the cleverness, it promises great performance, pushes itself to the limit and then some, in order to claim greatness, but fails to deliver. Its dedicated auto mode for low light shooting is a perfect example. It'll expose to near daylight conditions by cranking the ISO so high that the poor sensor nearly toasts itself in the process. So Mr. Photographer, you want to shoot at night do you?' 'No doubt you want the image to look like it's shot at night?' 'Leave it to me, I know best - hold still *click* - there you go a noisy over exposed image that could have been taken in late afternoon, by a three year old. What do you think?'

Full manual mode shooting it is for me then, with a smattering of aperture control mode and a little shutter control where its needed. I want control. I want a low ISO and shutter speed and I want my night photos to look like they were taken in low light, a little under exposed is great and I want it noise-free. If I need to use the tripod to avoid camera shake, I will.

Footnote: I asked my four-year-old daughter to decide which of the three images she preferred and the whisk won. Here are the others