A new camera for research

I seem to be due to spend a fair bit of time talking about the craft of writing this year, and one subject at these events is, inevitably, research. I do stacks of it. The most useful tool of all? Simple: a digital camera. I take pictures all the time, rotten pictures, in photographic terms, often, but ones that I can store, label and refer to constantly.

You can see lots of the pictures taken for the various Costa books here. Every entry for one of the titles includes a picture gallery of shots taken during the research process. I’ve used a number of cameras over the years, most recently the great little Panasonic FX100 which is a 12 megapixel compact that takes great pictures and is easy to use.

But I have now swapped to a new model, the Fuji F100d, above, which has just come out. Why?

Couple of reasons really. It is actually a touch smaller, and size always matters to me. The pictures are fantastic too, and on occasion better than the Panasonic. But most of all Fuji seem to have the knack of taking photos in low light. I seem to spend a lot of time in dark places. This is very useful. There’s also a ‘museum’ mode which turns off all noise and flash, and bumps up the low light ability, which makes things even easier? The downside? In some circumstances you get an annoying purple fringe on a few pictures. This is occasional, hard to reproduce, only happens in low light, and frankly hasn’t bothered me at all though if you google Fuji F100 and purple fringing you’ll see it has upset a few people.

Still, I’m happy with the beast and will soon be trying it out in bright sun in Calabria. It seems to cope well with both extremes. Here are two shots from Hong Kong taken with my F100, one with automatic flash in the Temple Street market, and another, on the beach setting, in searing daylight at Stanley. The full size, untouched versions, are available by clicking on the images below (and they’re big - 4mb or more, this is a 12 megapixel camera). The Stanley shot is the desktop on my new MacBook Air and looks lovely. I can’t quite believe the quality and detail of that photo.