The Nikon Coolpix 5600 is a really nice camera for someone looking for a straightforward point and shoot. It's actually got more than most point and shoot cameras offer. But at heart it still wants to do what it thinks best, and doesn't really offer the user a lot in the way of camera controls. Nonetheless, I did a lot of KAP with mine, and got a lot of good shots.
But I found that using it had fuddled my brain somewhat. After I posted pictures from my first flight with the A650, one of the other KAPers pointed out that my shutter speeds were fairly slow. He suggested putting the camera into shutter priority mode and setting the shutter speed to 1/640 sec. Aperture and ISO could adjust to compensate.
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Duh...
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It's funny, I use a DSLR all the time, and almost always think in terms of aperture priority or shutter priority. When I'm not using one of those two modes, I'm in manual mode trying to dial things down even finer than that to get just the right exposure.
But with my KAP rig, I'd really started treating it like a point and shoot camera simply because the camera I had bolted to the rig was a point and shoot. ARGH!
So when I went to Anaeho`omalu Bay, I put the camera in shutter priority mode at 1/640 sec exposure time. There was not one blurry picture in the lot. Not one. I do think the gain on the detector got bumped a little more than I like, so the images are a little noisier than I'm after. But I can fix that either by using CHDK's RAW mode for image storage, which would reduce the effects of compression on an already noisy image, or I can fix the ISO under 200 and bump the shutter speed down a little.
In any case the results were fantastic. I did several panoramic sequences that stitched beautifully. One was a repeat of a previous image I took with the Nikon, only this time done as a vertical pano:
The original image is over 6000 pixels high. At 150 DPI, that means I can make a print from that image 40" tall. Even with my large format photography, I've never actually printed anything larger than 36".
I guess I'm sold on digital photography now. Took me a while, but I'm sold.
Tom
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