Today I discovered a “small” problem with my digital camera, which is an otherwise fantastic Kodak EasyShare Z650. In some ways this is good as it will stop me blogging on ID and Religion…..

Today was a fairly overcast winters day but a lot of the colours were fantastic and it was as bright and sunny as could be expected. Now, walking through Stourhead gardens (see map) would normally be a wonderful chance to get photographs of scenery, plants and the like.

Another great advantage of going to Stourhead today (with the weather etc) is that the normal busy site should be sparsely populated (and it was).

All of this would, in normal circumstances, combine to make the day ideal for some wintery photography. I am not saying the vibrant summer colours would be possible, but I was hoping that I could take some pictures which would show the weather off to best effect.

Oddly this wasn’t really always the case.

For “reference” on the right is a picture taken at Stourhead in Jul 06 with a Vivatar V3935 Digital Camera (low end at best). You can see some of the wonderful colour and the vibrant scenery which go together to make Stourhead a wonderful place to visit.

I wasn’t for one moment expecting to get the same results today!

Now, as I said, it was overcast and light levels were not brilliant. The Z650 is a good little camera with a variety of settings and a great zoom function (10x optical) – which is the main reason I bought it. Like most “affordable” digital cameras, it has a built in flash which is housed in a little unit at the top of the camera’s main body. This flash is good for general use and fill flash functions but has a tendency to cause red eye pretty much everytime you take an indoors photo of a face.

The third picture was taken in Nov, with the same Kodak Z650 as I had today and shows off some of the colours around the lake area.

Today however the camera was certainly “underperforming.”

A continuing problem I have with it is trying to get it to focus on anything with a lot of red in the picture. It just refuses to do this. My initial suspicions put this down to the camera using a green light to determine focus, and when it is a red-dominant subject it causes problems – but I am far from sure. Given the time of year, Holly berries make wonderful images but to take one, I have to find something about the same distance away, focus on that and then move the camera to the berry. This is very odd to say the least and was certainly noticable today (although there were a lot less “red” things around.

The main hurdle today was the camera’s difficulty getting the correct exposure. Because of the overcast natural light, the camera wanted to use flash where ever possible (even on long distance landscape shots) and seems to have adjusted itself, expecting the flash. On the distance shots, everything came out underexposed (see picture on the left for example) or when manual exposure was used the only things which got results ended up with shutter speeds which could have been measured in days rather than hundredths of a second. This in turn, meant the slightest movement on either my behalf or the subject, meant full motion blur as if it was a formula 1 track (see picture on right for example). Trying to find the “happy medium” was far from easy and (IMHO of course) seemed to defeat the purpose of having a point and shoot camera.

The problem was much harder with moving targets – the following are some examples of swans and were the result of a lot of experimentation with the settings:

Anyway – I still like the camera, this is just a new limitation I need to be aware of. There were lots of good photographs taken!