Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Sony WX100


It does capture my cat's eye color but only in sunlight. It won't capture it inside.

So I just got a Sony WX100 on the recommendation of my techy-dorky friend. For awhile I was using Brendan's old professional Canon, but while I got a few great shots out of it, mostly it was clunky, too heavy, hard to use and far too conspicuous (and it didn't help that it was older and I had no idea how to actually work the buttons. Oh, and the viewfinder was the only way to see what you were photographing - you couldn't see from the digital screen). 

I was also using my iPhone for photos, which is fine if you see some bad English in the night market ("Let's Happy Together!") but I wanted something better. Something more. Something I could take on trips to Orchid Island (next week), home (Christmas) and Sri Lanka (Chinese New Year). 

But, as much as I am an enthusiast for good photos, I'm no pro. I do think I'm pretty good at composition - but not good at technical stuff. So I asked a friend - a friend who, I swear, memorized all the specs of all possible cameras and ran them through a computer program in his head to determine the best one, because that's just the way he is - and he recommended a Sony WX100 for my needs.

So far, I'm really happy. It's been one afternoon, but still, I'm pretty thrilled with the photos I'm getting. The shots in this post are ones I didn't try to hard to take - imperfect lighting, not a lot of time to really look at what I was shooting and adjust, and in the end I still got some good pics. Obviously, I played with the fancy new settings.

By the way, if you want one, they're NT$9900 at Guanghua.
This is my living room window - when I take a photo like this with lights off in the living room, generally, other cameras pick up so much glare that you can't see anything but light out the window. The WX100 is the first camera that made a decent shot of this. 

With background blur - pretty good, although if I edited it I'd make the black metal parts a bit brighter.

Very clear with primary color capture - set on blue obviously

Not as good capturing my bougainvillea - it would have picked up red but pink is difficult. Anyone know if I can do something about that?

Indoor light, background blur with my cat


Green only is pretty good
Need to focus on getting it to select color and focus on the thing I want - it focused more on the spices than on the anti-evil eye charm.



1 comment:

Cahleen @ The Alt Story said...

Wow, I'm actually commenting! I've been thinking bout this a lot lately, and I love the quote (forgot who said it), "The best camera is the one you have with you." So true! I would love to be a better photographer and have a fancy DSLR camera, but honestly, it aint gonna happen anytime soon. While chasing Jonathan around (the main person that I want to be able to photograph at a moment's notice), I don't even really have time to pull out my Canon IXUS (which isn't bad as far as point and shoots go) and mess with the settings, and I don't even want to carry the thing. It's for this reason that I've been researching iPhoneography lately, and why I upgraded from an old 3G to my new 4s. The camera is actually pretty good, and I've seen some photos edited by the app, Snapseed (which I bought but haven't had time to figure out how to use yet - I don't know all the photography terms) that are quite good. Anyway, your pics with this new camera of yours are awesome!