Is my cam worthy?

[Nelson]

ARGHHHHHHHHH!!! *inarticulate screaming*.......(If there\'s any other kind of screaming)

Damnit, I forgot to enter a subject after I finished my post, and the forum thingie (which hates me) told me to go back... I (like the naive thing I am) believed the nice forum thingie and pressed back, but the bad forum thingie had told me wrong, and my post was erased. Soo, I\'m gonna sum my previously eloquent and witty post up, and get to the goods...

I just bought a Nikon Coolpix 2200 camera for about 400 bucks canadian (which was hard earned, too) Now, however, I\'m worried that it won\'t suffice to take piccies, since it\'s only a 2 megapixel camera. I haven\'t had a chance to get it near a painted mini yet, and won\'t for another couple of days, so I\'m suffering thinking of how crappy it may be. Could any kind people out there give me some examples of decent pics taken with my camera, or at least taken with a 2 megapixel camera?

Bless you, good souls....

 

[KatieG]

Sorry, but you\'ve fallen into the trap of \"more megapixels\" = better, but that\'s not always true. Your camera should be more than adequate for posting pictures to the web, as pictures on the web are relatively low resolution anyways. If you want an 11 inches X 17 inches picture of your mini, then you\'re out of luck, but otherwise, the camera is fine. Better than fine really as the Nikon Coolpix line has the best macro feature on the market.
--Katie G.
P.S. If you check out my minis here:
http://www.coolminiornot.com/browse.php?submitter=KatieG
All of the early pictures I took with a 1 megapixel camera (all the ones on page 5 and some on page 4). The newest pictures are taken with a 4 megapixel camera (but not at its highest setting, I have a choice on that camera of taking pics on highest, high, medium and low resolution and they\'re on medium). Also much of the improvement is mainly the better macro of the newer camera and better lighting conditions, and has little to do with the higher resolution...

 

[supervike]

BACK BUTTON BLUES...

Yes, my finest posts were eliminated because of the damnable back button!

I think you should be ok, just like Katie G. sez BUT

shouldn\'t you have asked this question BEFORE you bought the camera??

Just curious

 

[Nelson]

*Glares at Supervike* Yes, that may or may not have been a good idea, I can\'t say for sure, maybe, I guess........


And thanks for your help, both of you *pointed look at Supervike* I\'m feeling a bit better now, especially after looking at those pics, Katie (which are actually pretty decent)

 

[supervike]

ah nelson!!

You really crack me up, and have a wonderful sense of hum......


**whoa whoa wait a sec, PUT DOWN THAT GUN**

lol

 

[yrret]

idget

Please tell me you didn\'t pay 400 for This Camera? that is only 169 at amazon?

I assume that was with a bunch of spare batteries and memory card and tripod and a free night with a naked woman to test it on.

But otherwise, the camera should be fine. Believe me, 2 megapixels is plenty depressing enough a size for a mini pic. It does limit it for using for other stuff though.
One of the nice things about a higher resolution camera, is that it lets you crop a photo down.

So when you are on a big trip and you realize you are centered right smack in the middle of the grand canyon because the person who took your picture has the artistic eye of Mo the Mechanic you can still get a good picture by cropping it down and you have enough pixels to spare.

wooo. Yrret gets smarmy.
(then rereads post and realizes it is canadian dinero.) (But leaves foot in mouth so others can appreciate it.)

 

[Nelson]

Originally posted by yrret
Please tell me you didn\'t pay 400 for This Camera? that is only 169 at amazon?

Umm........I didn\'t pay 400 bucks for this camera that is only 169 at Amazon...
Well, as you said, the price was canadian, and we had some acessories and a tripod thrown in, but I\'m prepared to admit that a smooth talking nerd boy working at London Drugs ripped us off a bit... You can take your foot out, good sir.


And Supervike, don\'t worry, that\'s no gun in my pocket, I was merely excited by your compliment....

 

[KatieG]

Originally posted by Nelson
Umm........I didn\'t pay 400 bucks for this camera that is only 169 at Amazon...
Well, as you said, the price was canadian, and we had some acessories and a tripod thrown in, but I\'m prepared to admit that a smooth talking nerd boy working at London Drugs ripped us off a bit... You can take your foot out, good sir.

Jeez, I took a look at this camera, I find it disturbing they don\'t even give you a card with it. The 14.5 MB internal memory won\'t get very far, I hope one of the other things you got was a nice big SD card. I wouldn\'t have gone with the AA batteries either, that camera will eat them like crazy... I hope you have some rechargeables... (preferably at least 4 so you can use the camera while the other batteries are recharging). Sorry, don\'t mean to be discouraging, its mostly personal choice anyways. First thing I did was buy a big card for my camera so that now I can take over a hundred pics on one card Second thing I did was buy a second battery so I could use it while mine was charging... oh yeah, FYI I have a Nikon Coolpix 4300, great camera though the 4MP is probably way more than I need 99% of the time...
--Katie G.

 

[airhead]

Nelson, repeat after me...

Ebay is my friend.
epinions.com is my friend.
half.com is my friend.

repeat as needed.

Welcome to the club. I look forward to pics of your works. CMON limits the pixel width of you photos anyway (300?) But you can make them forever long. (Linked pics via photoshop).

 

[Nelson]

*Looks in mirror*
Ebay is my friend.
epinions.com is my friend.
half.com is my friend.

Oh, sweet Jesus I\'m excited!! I got home at 5:00 am this morning, after a sleepless 12 hour bus trip.....and 2 hours later I was awake, taking pics of my minis. After viewing \'em on my computer, I\'m happy to say that even the Coolpix 2200 takes awesome pictures. Now all I\'ve gotta do is get them up on CMON. Can you put them on directly from your computer, or do you need a web site to host them first? If so, I think I\'ll get Mr.Lobster to host them for me on his site.

 

[KatieG]

You can upload them directly from your computer as long as they are less than 600 pixels wide and less than 100kb in size. I also prefer to upload them to the sire rather than to rely on external sites because the pics get yanked if your site goes down for too long, and you lose all the votes and comments if that happens...
--Katie G.

 

[supervike]

idget indeed!

Originally posted by yrret
wooo. Yrret gets smarmy.
(then rereads post and realizes it is canadian dinero.) (But leaves foot in mouth so others can appreciate it.)

Yes, the one never tires of the taste of feet! I have savored that flavor much too often!!

lollol

 

[Nelson]

Originally posted by KatieG
You can upload them directly from your computer as long as they are less than 600 pixels wide and less than 100kb in size. I also prefer to upload them to the sire rather than to rely on external sites because the pics get yanked if your site goes down for too long, and you lose all the votes and comments if that happens...
--Katie G.

Crap, most of my pics are around a megabyte in size...and I\'m too much of a stubborn bastard to downsize them. The biggest problem is that I\'ve put them together in multiple views for each mini. But hey, I\'m getting the hang of this whole photography thing pretty fast! Great fun!!

Originally posted by Supervike

Yes, the one never tires of the taste of feet! I have savored that flavor much too often!!

Yes, the sweet ambrosia of foot is one that\'s all too familiar to me as well....

 

[finn17]

Ah, \'toe jam\'....

The breakfast of champions...:bouncy:

 

[Nelson]

lol
Kurt Vonnegut has some great quotable phrases.....\"Go take a flying f*ck at a rolling donut\" is one of my personal favourites...but sadly, none of my fellow inmates in high school have ever read anything by him, so if I ever say that, I usually just get strange looks, or maybe a friendly punch in the gut......

 

[finn17]

Don\'t give it a second thought...

Your turn will come when they come grovelling to you for a raise in a few years time

Then you can give them an equally friendly punch in the wallet:bouncy:

 

[Nelson]

Well, I was originally thinking of going through years and years of grueling and painful training to become a superhuman..... but your idea sounds nicer.....
Nahhh, I exaggerate, I\'ve got enough \"cover\" hobbies like biking and stuff to remain one of the kids who isn\'t \"meat\" for the bullies..

 

[KatieG]

Originally posted by Nelson
Crap, most of my pics are around a megabyte in size...and I\'m too much of a stubborn bastard to downsize them. The biggest problem is that I\'ve put them together in multiple views for each mini. But hey, I\'m getting the hang of this whole photography thing pretty fast! Great fun!!

Trust me, if you have a decent photoediting program, you can get the size down on those suckers very easily. Since you\'re using a Nikon Coolpix it already saves it as a jpeg, but you can compress it a bit quite easily without losing much detail. For one thing, the size of your picture will be way over 600 pixels wide, so the first thing you should do is shrink it down (and when doing collages do them top to bottom not side to side to preserve the biggest pic possible). Also, crop out anything extra, again to make the pic as big as possible. By the time you\'ve cropped and sized down to 600 pixels, if you\'ve only got a single pic and not a collage, you should already be close to the 100kb range. If you\'re doing a collage though you\'ll have to compress it more. I only know how it works in photoshop 6 as that\'s what I use, but when you hit save as and save as a jpeg you get the option to save with a number from 1-12 to represent the amount of compression (1 lots of compression, crappy pic, 12 no compression, best pic, but too big). It also shows me how big the file will be if I select a different number. So I just pick the largest number I can get that will leave me under 100kb, its usually 8 or 9 for single pics, 5-6 for collages. To be honest, I notice little difference between ones at 8 or 9 and those at 5 or 6, but feel free to browse my pics and see if you see a big difference between the single pic minis and the collages... By the way, pictures taken straight from the camera using the \"medium\" setting from my 4 MP camera (which I guess give me about a 2 MP resolution) are right around 850kb before I touch them.... it\'s the resizing that really brings down the size of the file more than the compression....
--Katie G.

 

[Nelson]

Hmm, well I\'ve got Photoshop, but it\'s 5.0, and I can\'t find some of the options, like \"save to web\" and stuff. I\'ve been cropping them down alot, and resizing them too, to about (on average) 300 by 400. Which, in my opinion, is plenty small. And for some reason, when I save them, they come out as quicktime files, which I don\'t understand.

 

[KatieG]

Originally posted by Nelson
Hmm, well I\'ve got Photoshop, but it\'s 5.0, and I can\'t find some of the options, like \"save to web\" and stuff. I\'ve been cropping them down alot, and resizing them too, to about (on average) 300 by 400. Which, in my opinion, is plenty small. And for some reason, when I save them, they come out as quicktime files, which I don\'t understand.

How big are the files after cropping and resizing? Be sure to use \"save as\" and not save for one thing, and select file type jpeg just in case (for whatever reason) they\'re being saved as movies rather than pictures. (My guess would be your camera might be saving it as a movie filetype or something? Or maybe you accidentaly are using the short clip setting rather than actually taking a pic? I have no idea how to use that setting on my camera since I never use it...) I don\'t think 5 has save for web, but I never use that feature on 6, using save as and file type as jpeg gives me a screen where one of the things on it shows the file size. I don\'t know if 5 will do that. Another thing to look at is what is the resoultion, anything larger than 72 is wasted on the web... (check under image size). Hope this helps...
--Katie G.