Compact Digital Cameras

Creativity Breeds Convenience

by Wes Kisting

Okay, I know exactly how you feel. Your expeditions are life-changing events full of magic and drama and spectacular landscapes. You don't want to miss one sliver of the beauty. You want to capture it all — the sights, the moods, the colors, and the lighting — but how are you going to do that without a state-of-the-art camera and an arsenal of specialized lenses? In your mind, stellar photographs only seem possible if your camera gives you complete control over every conceivable setting, or allows you to switch lenses to suit your every mood. Believe me, I've been there. But fortunately, I came to my senses.

Back in 2001, I started toying with the issue of buying a new camera, but I wasn't convinced I actually needed one. A practical dilemma kept preventing me from reaching any serious decision. I kept asking myself: "Do I really want to spend a fortune on a digital-SLR (DSLR) and invest in a set of expensive, specialized lenses just to have more control over photographs I can already capture adequately with my film SLR?" The frugal side of me said no, but the perfectionist in me dug in his heels and insisted that having the ultimate do-anything DSLR camera was the only way to truly capture the experience of my trips. Obviously, I was at a decision-making stand-still. So I waited for something to happen.

Three years passed, but something did happen: I spent a lot more time thinking about what exactly I liked and didn't like about the different cameras I had used on kayaking trips. The list was long and the cameras were many, but I kept coming back to two particular cameras: my super-sophisticated Nikon SLR with its arsenal of specialized lenses, and (oddly enough) the cheap, disposable, waterproof point-and-shoot cameras you can buy at almost any gas station, grocery store, or Wal-Mart. Without a doubt, these were the best cameras I had used, though both had their limitations. Why? Well, the list of pros and cons went something like this:

Nikon SLR film camera with my 2 favorite lenses (28-80mm and 80-200mm)
Pros: ultra-versatile; complete control over resulting image; adaptable to virtually any lighting, distance, or mood; sleek and professional looking; great "feel" and handling
Cons: bulky; inconvenient; too expensive to risk dropping in the water; a hassle to get in and out of a dry bag; too awkward to capture unexpected pictures at a moment's notice; potentially easier to damage

Disposable Waterproof 35mm point-and-shoot
Pros: ultra-simple; waterproof; disposable; able to be stored on-deck; ready to fire at a moment's notice
Cons: no control over settings or image quality; no zoom; no way to load with slide-film; hard to achieve professional-quality results; no slide-film capability; often yields mundane results

This list turned out to be an eye-opener for two reasons. First, it made me absolutely certain I would never be satisfied resorting to disposable cameras for the rest of my days. Simply put, I wanted a camera that could capture near-professional-quality results and would give me at least some control over the presentation of my subject. Ideally, I wanted a camera that could produce dazzling slide show presentations of my trips. Disposable cameras were ultra-convenient because they could be kept within quick and easy reach, but I had never managed to use one to capture a more-than-satisfactory shot, and slide shows were out of the question. As for image quality, details always came out too small, too washed out, or too blotchy for my tastes. What I really liked about waterproof disposable cameras was the ease and immediacy of access: the ability to snap a picture at a moment's notice—between paddle strokes, if need be—without even coming to a stop. Because of this simple fact, waterproof disposable cameras had allowed me to capture many, many pictures that other cameras would have missed. The quality was poor, yes, but any picture is better than no picture.

Second, the list of pros and cons made me realize that although my SLR camera was incredibly versatile, its versatility suffered (quite severely) from its utter lack of convenience. When you're taking a hard-core touring expedition, most of your pictures are shot from the seat of a kayak, in conditions which are less than ideal for an SLR camera. Why? Because when the wind and waves kick up, the last thing you want to do is fumble with a bunch of lenses, filters, and attachments to create the right "effect" or "mood". Either your expensive camera will end up in the drink, you'll miss the photo opportunity you're trying to capture, or you'll quit bothering with the effort altogether because you're tired of the hassle of having to get everything in and out of dry storage everytime you see something picture-worthy. If you're strictly an on-shore photographer, this won't be a problem for you. But my favorite shots (by far) come from the cockpit of my kayak so, to me, this was my major reservation about my SLR camera.

Getting Over the SLR Obsession

After three years of pondering over the issue, I had yet to reach any conclusions. I just continued lugging my SLR camera and a few waterproof disposable cameras everywhere I paddled. In fact, I had almost resigned myself to the bleak fact that snapping a great photo would always involve a lengthy process of extricating my SLR from dry storage. But then, quite unexpectedly, my SLR film camera broke down just one week before my 420-mile trip down the Mississippi river. The local camera shop estimated a repair time of three to four weeks. That meant I needed a substitute camera, and I needed it fast. So, armed with my mental list of likes and dislikes, and feeling fairly certain my next camera ought to be digital in some form, I went back to the camera store.

The camera I came away with was not at all the camera I expected to buy: a Nikon Coolpix 5200 compact digital camera. Weighing only a few ounces, and negligibly bulkier than a pack of playing cards, there was no question that this camera was small—even when compared to a waterproof disposable. But despite its diminutive stature, it packed quite a bit of punch. With 5.1 megapixel resolution, an impressive range of automatic and manual settings, moderate optical zoom ability, a razor-sharp macro mode, and the addition of a 512 MB memory card, I found myself able to capture suprisingly crisp and brilliant photos with little or no fuss. The quality of the blues and greens, in particular, was amazing. This little camera could translate skies, forests, and waterscapes into digital information with remarkable precision, and it could hold over 100 photos when set to capture at the highest resolution, or over 300 pictures when set to its still-spectacular "normal" 5 megapixel mode.

Even more impressively, it could capture sunsets or other straight-into-the-sun effects shots with outstanding clarity. Where a lot of other compact digital cameras would have translated solar glare into a strange assortment of lines and shapes, or an annoying white cast over the whole picture, the Coolpix 5200 translated every last ray of light with faithful accuracy. Best of all, printed up to the size of a standard 4" x 6" photo, the image quality difference between the Coolpix 5200 and a print made from slide film was almost undetectable! In fact, the Coolpix's images appeared impressively sharp at much larger sizes, with only a minor loss of clarity, detail, and color saturation when compared to slide film. Naturally, many of the details came out "softer" in the enlarged images, but the minor degradation in quality was more than acceptable. Here was a true revelation worthy of trumpets blaring and angels singing: a lightweight, pocket-sized camera packing enough punch to match standard-sized prints from an SLR!

How Capable?

Certainly, my SLR camera is far more capable of achieving true "professional-quality" results of the sort you would expect to find gracing the pages of, say, Canoe & Kayak magazine. But at 5.1 megapixels, the Coolpix 5200 can capture plenty of stunning images. To say that the Coolpix 5200 is not capable of achieving professional-quality results is a lot like saying no consumer-level stereo will ever give you the high-end sound quality of a professional concert-stage sound system. While it may be true in the strictest sense, few audiophiles will ever balk at the quality of sound which comes from, say, the best stereo sold at Wal-Mart—unless, of course, you tell them that the stereo came from Wal-Mart. In the end, it's the skill of the photographer, not the camera, that makes or breaks an image.

Practically speaking, the major trade-off of point-and-shoot cameras (compared to SLR or DSLR cameras) is that the resulting images have much more "noise" (digital artifacts and imaging abnormalities that give a "grainy" or distorted texture to the image) because the sensor on a point-and-shoot camera is quite small. This is not a problem in standard-sized prints, but it does restrict how much you can crop, enlarge, or edit portions of the image before it becomes unflatteringly distorted. If you don't plan to do a lot of photo-editing or large-scale enlargements (beyond 8" x 10"), a camera like the Coolpix 5200 should more than satisfy your picture-lust.

Compared to other compact digital cameras in its class, the Coolpix 5200 boasts some of the best optics and color saturation, more controllable features, and a truly user-friendly button arrangement. If it's still outclassed by SLRs—which it certainly is—it is only to the exceedingly fine extent of gigantic-scale image and poster reproductions, or commercial-level portrait sales. Just like the Wal-Mart stereo, which fails to capture some of the highest and lowest frequencies which would otherwise inject subtle touches of flavor into the music it plays, a compact digital camera like the Coolpix 5200 cannot quite capture the subtlest details of the optic spectrum. Without comparing each digital image to its slide-film equivalent under a magnifying glass, you'll never even notice what you're missing. To my mind, unless you're trying to start up a professional photography studio and your main focus is to profit from your pictures, this barely qualifies as a limitation.

No, the Coolpix 5200 won't give you razor-crisp results above 6" x 8", but how often do you really print pictures larger? No, the Coolpix 5200 won't quite capture the subtleties of color which the human eye can only barely detect, but why should this cast any shadow over its still outstanding ability to capture 99% of what you do see? No, the Coolpix 5200 won't give you complete manual control over settings like aperture and shutter speed, but when you're firing off shots from the seat of your kayak, how much do you want to be fiddling with those things anyway? No, the Coolpix 5200 won't look quite as "savy" and "professional" in your hands, but who are you trying to impress anyway? For me, the amazing image quality, excellent array of automatic exposure modes, and the dramatic reduction in size and weight provided ample motive to take the risk and invest in a compact digital camera.

Making the Switch

With my film SLR in the repair shop and only one week left until my two-week 420-mile paddling trip down the Mississippi, I seized every chance I could find to push the Coolpix 5200 to its photographic limits. I shot pictures of sunsets, sunrises, shadows, close-up details, moving subjects, fast-moving subjects, intricate patterns, reflective surfaces, strongly contrasting surfaces, poorly lit subjects, and every other photographic challenge I could find. The Coolpix 5200 went through the paces with all the skill, if not quite the perfection, of a thoroughbred SLR.

The one challenge which I found impossible to compensate for was the pooor low-light performance. Like most digital cameras, the Coolpix 5200 struggles to photograph well in dark and near-dark lighting, such as moonlit landscapes. It can capture such images, but the resulting image quality leaves a lot to be desired, yielding an image which is punctuated with thousands of tiny, pixellated details, grainy textures, and digital artifacts. The results are actually fairly comparable to what you might capture if you took a late-evening shot using ISO 800 print film. But they're certainly no match for the results that can be captured with a tripod-mounted SLR and 100 speed (or slower) slide film.

The "noisy" image results in very low light were the only glaring weakness I could find—a weakness typical to most digital cameras in general, even some high end DSLRs. In my mind, this wasn't really a serious weakness because I don't shoot a lot of night photography on my paddling trips. All of the other issues I encountered—strange color casts when shooting directly into the sun, color "banding" problems in sunset images, poor clarity of backlit subjects, blown highlights, and so on—could be fixed quite easily with a few tricks of composition and some clever exploitation of the Coolpix's various settings and inherent limitations.

A Photographic Change-of-Heart

Nikon Coolpix 5200 and Pelican 1010 Micro Case

When it came time to put the Coolpix 5200 to the real test, capturing images on my trip down the Mississippi River, the camera really came into its own. At once, I fell in love. Gone were the days of fumbling to stuff my SLR camera into a dry bag or pull it out in time to capture an unexpected shot. The Coolpix 5200 was so small that I could fit it into a tiny Pelican 1010 Micro Case (5-7/16" x 4-1/16" x 2-1/8"). The micro case is smaller than a standard VHS video tape, and equipped with a latch which forms a water-tight seal when closed. Because of its negligible size, I could fit it easily into my under-deck bag, strap it on deck, or even let it sit in the lap of my sprayskirt. Regardless, when it came time to snap a photo, the camera was almost instantly in hand. In less than 30 seconds, I could open the case, retrieve the camera, snap the photo, and stow it away again. As you can guess, this eliminated all of the hassles associated with protecting my SLR from the water. Instead, the whole affair felt less intrusive. Whereas my kayak would normally come to a stop before I could have my SLR in hand, now I found myself able to retrive, fire, and stow my camera while barely even breaking stride. While this fact proved convenient and enjoyable at all times, it was particularly helpful when snapping shots in waves. Here was a supremely usable camera, conducive to easy use under virtually any conditions in which I cared to snap photos.

To be completely honest, I quickly fell in love with my compact digital camera—even more so when I returned home and downloaded my pictures to the computer. Of the 350 pictures I shot on my Mississippi trip, only a handful (less than a dozen) came out at "below average" quality, with signs of distortion or poor detail. The vast majority were razor-sharp, more than half were perfectly or near-perfectly exposed, colors were vibrant and accurate, and at least twenty images were captured as beautifully as if I had captured them with my SLR camera. I was amazed. Previously, I would never have guessed that a compact digital camera with such diminutive proportions and comparatively limited zoom capability (the range of the Coolpix 5200's optical zoom is limited to roughly 35 mm to 70 mm) could produce such impressive results. Of course, it also passed the final test—printing the final images up to 8 x 10—with flying colors. At once, my assumptions about "good paddling photography" were changed forever. For better or for worse (I think for better), a compact digital camera would be my constant companion on every trip—whether I brought along my SLR or not.

Check out this shot from my Mississippi trip, taken in relatively low light, from the seat of a drifting kayak, amid the early morning fog—conditions which are fairly challenging for a digital point-and-shoot camera to capture well.

[Picture]

Notice that my paddling partner is sharply silhouetted, the motion of his paddle is well-frozen (no blur), the fog is faithfully reproduced (albeit a bit too soft to capture its stunning detail), the subtle colors of the sky are accurately rendered, the lighting is very accurate (the trees, however, are a touch dark), the texture and color of the water is superb, and the highlights are quite good.

A little sharpening can be added in post-production with a program like Adobe Photoshop to create a clearer, crisper effect more like film—especially, to bring out a bit more detail in the fog—but I usually leave my shots unaltered. In this case, I think the softness of the photo actually helps to capture the mood better (though taste is subjective and you may disagree). Keep in mind also that when you see the full-size file printed on premium glossy photo paper, it looks much better than it appears on the monitor—the colors and detail get better. This is a really gorgeous shot, and most folks who see it are surprised to learn it's a print from a digital point-and-shoot camera.

A Simpler, More Enjoyable Experience

Nearly two years (and four paddling trips) after I first embraced compact digital cameras, I continue to be impressed with the power and versatility of my Coolpix 5200, not to mention delighted by its divine convenience. Now that I've learned to exploit every last setting and mechanical quirk, it captures better images than I ever imagined possible, and though there are still times when a truly striking landscape reawakens my craving for my trusty old SLR or a medium-format camera, I have yet to feel as though the Coolpix 5200 failed to capture the mood, the experience, or the magic of any trip.

Better yet, I no longer feel as though the photographing experience impedes or intrudes upon my ability to enjoy the trip as it unfolds. While my SLR camera often felt incongruous with the terrific simplicity of paddling, the Coolpix 5200 has never felt so. Sure, there are still times when I pack my SLR camera along, but it no longer preoccupies my focus or complicates my simple enjoyment of the gorgeous, photo-worthy spectacles I discover. In this regard, though it may sound funny to say, my compact digital camera has truly set me free. If you've ever felt enslaved to your SLR camera, perhaps it's time that you were set free as well.