I know I keep harping on about how my Panasonic super-zoom camera is hugely better than any DSLR and at a tiny fraction of the price...

Here is a hand-held, full-frame, spur-of-the-moment snapshot that came out OK.

tanstaafl.

Still a considerable amount of digital artifacts, but impressive for what it is.

Yeah what's with the really bad digital artifacts? Sure it's only 700kB but it shouldn't be that bad particularly when there's a large chunk of highly compressible data should it?

My guess is that it's due to the shot being taken with digital zoom turned on. Digital zoom -- in-camera crop & scale with crappy resampling algorithms.

Some of the digital artifacts are interesting and they point out what's up with the CCD on the Panasonic. My Panasonic point-n-shoot had this same issue:

When taking a zoomed-in low-light picture at high ISO, you can see chroma artifacts matching the shape of the hexagonal pattern of the CCD. The device's CCD is made up of hexagons which get mapped into X/Y pixels by the digital processing software in the camera.

In Doug's shot, you can faintly see alternating red and green hexagonal shapes in the chroma channel. It's particularly visible in this photo because the moon is all one chroma shade (nominally gray, but in this case atmosphere gives the whole shot a color cast).

Issues with chroma in low-light situations with high ISO are nothing new to point-n-shoot compact digital cameras. I always found the hexagonal pattern interesting on the Panasonics though.

The other digital artifacts I'm seeing there are data compression artifacts, possibly happening because he compressed the photo after-the-fact to make the file size smaller (or had set the file size to small in the camera settings). And there's also the usual grainy luminance channel that you always get in low light photos at high ISO.

CCD? CMOS, surely.

OK, a lot of you are missing the point of this whole thing.

No, it is not a super-high-resolution photograph of the moon comparable to the best of Mt. Palomar's efforts. What it IS is a demonstration of built-in capabilities of a $450 point and shoot camera.

I want to see is your full-frame hand-held moon photo shots. Lets see how much better you can do.

tanstaafl.

ps: I know this post seems a bit on the snarky side, I don't mean for it to be. I really do want to see some other examples.

db

But there's no point in doing that as nobody in their right mind would take a shot like that with a camera like that, and if they did, they wouldn't do it hand held. The only good shots I've seen of a similar nature have been done with a 500mm + teleconverter, a 5D Mk2 body and more importantly, a tripod. Even with all that, he still ended up cropping to get it to fill the frame.

Sorry if it hurts your feelings Doug. But it's not a good picture.

That's Doug's point I think. That the camera does a better than average job than other point and shoots. But if that's the best image you can get from the camera then I agree there's not a lot of point in this sort of photo.

I don't think it's all that bad, clearly lots of digital artefacts from the zooming, the colour balance is off etc...

But it is impressive that you can get any detail from the moon at all on a point and shoot.

It's not true to say it's better than ANY DSLR, clearly that is not true. But for something you can easily carry with you I'd say it was a good effort.

Not sure I would be shouting about it on the internet, but still a goos effort.

Cheers

Cris

OK, somebody understands.

Yes, you can get a better picture with a large-sensor DSLR with a wheelbarrow full of lenses and accessories. Probably $2,000 -- $3,000 would do it nicely.

But this was a snapshot from a camera that, without any changes or accessories or fiddling around, my very next photo could have been a full-frame picture of a small flower taken from half an inch away, and the one after that a head and shoulders portrait taken from 20 feet.

This camera allows me to take photos that would be difficult if not impossible with a typical DSLR without having to carry around a lot of kit. (Remember this?) I don't take pictures for magazine covers or wall-sized posters, I take them for my own enjoyment. Every once in a while one of them turns out (IMHO, not necessarily yours) to be fairly attention-grabbing.

BTW, I probably didn't make myself clear that I was joking (thus the ) about the "...better than any DSLR..." bit. I know that DSLR cameras have the potential (with appropriate len$e$) to take pictures that are technically better than my camera can take. It's just that I am not willing to give up my enormous flexibility and ease of use, things like 25-600mm focal length (2400mm with digital zoom) at f2.8, metered built-in flash to 40+ feet, 60fps burst shooting mode, HD video, built-in stitching, high dynamic range shooting, etc. in order to gain marginal improvements in picture quality that will be difficult to detect at 8x10 inches or smaller.

As always, YMMV.

tanstaafl.

ps: Cris--It is with some trepidation (after all, you being a professional photographer there is a small chance that you just might know more about it than I do. ) that I disagree with your statement "...the colour balance is off...". If, due to dust or whatever in the air and nearness to the horizon the moon looks to be that color to the eye, should I then alter the photograph to conform with what its conventional color usually is?

It's all about context, what colour is the moon ???

It's certainly not yellow/orange, and in the context of a picture of the solo moon it's better the correct colour is reflected in the image. If you had included some other detail suggesting atmospheric conditions were causing the moon to be yellow then I would say it would fit.

Shooting RAW on a DSLR gives you more options after the fact to fiddle with this.

I would suggest that posting a picture like that on this BBS is not going to get you the rave reviews and confirmation it's an amazing camera that you are after, people here have a highly technical eye and will see those aspects to a photo before the creative. That is not a rule of people here, but a general observation.

Cheers

Cris

I should have said from the beginning:

Yes, it's impressive for a point-n-shoot to be able to zoom in that far, and get that sharp of a picture.

Yes, obviously. I was impressed by this picture. Up until recently, it would have been impossible to take without expen$ive equipment (or cheap film equipment) . My new Panasonic pocket camera leaves me with very little desire to lug around the DSLR.

I'm always impressed by Doug's photographic efforts.

While we're on the subject of non-DSLR shots, I'm staggered by how panorama modes on phones have got now. Taken on my iPhone 5s, took 5 seconds or so, zero manual stitching or editing:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andynormancx/10610035694/sizes/o/

Of course, the iPhone seems to do it by slit-scanning the video or something, because if your subjects are moving in the panorama, you get this kind of thing.

If it could do the slit scan technique fast enough it would be fine, because then it would be like one of these awesome old cameras, which you may recognize as being repurposed as a ghost scanner in Ghostbusters 2.

I definitely does more than just a simple slit scan, it can deal with some movement. I does some sort of correction when it detects movement in the image, which can sometimes be 100% effective.

But yes, like all stitched panoramas you can end up with some very odd effects.

Here is an example of what I mean, there was plenty of movement going on in this scene:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/andynormancx/10610400123/sizes/o/

I tried to do a panorama shot last week of a street dance scene with over 100 rather active dancers.

My stitching software (I didn't even try to do it in camera) is Microsoft ICE which normally does a fantastic job. ICE wouldn't even attempt the stitch, said that the pictures were not of the same subject or didn't overlap.

tanstaafl.

I've been waiting for a clear, non rainy night, when the moon was out. Finally...

Here is my effort with $300* of DSLR and lens. Hand-held, with my 75-300mm stablised lens on my Canon DSLR.

To me at least it looks a fair bit better than Doug's camera managed (none of that significant chroma noise and digital artefacting for start).

Now, you're going to say "what DSLR and 300mm stablised lens can you get for $650". And you'd be right, you can't buy a new DSLR and that lens for that price.

However, my Canon 10D is over ten years old now and so is the lens. You can pick up the body and the lens second hand for well under $300.

It is "only" 6 megapixels. But it is still capable of taking better quality pictures than any point-and-shoot on the market now.

And yes, it doesn't have the flexibility within the same weight budget as Doug's camera. But to try and pretend that a flexible, light, point-and-shoot can match a DSLR (even a 10 year old one) on image quality is just wrong. The DSLR will win on quality every time.

I should point out, that unlike Doug's shot, this wasn't full frame. In fact the moon takes up probably less than a 60th of the frame. But if you are after a telephoto shot like this that doesn't matter. Cropping a 10 year old DSLR shot down to give you the same field of view as a zoomed in modern super zoom point-and-shot gives you a better quality (less noisy) result.

And of course DSLR sensors have improved some over the last 10 years...

P.S. my shot isn't as sharp as Doug's, but to my mind his has been overly sharpened by his camera, if I wanted to I could sharpen it up. Also, my shot was with the in camera JPEG conversion, if I had really wanted to I could have messed about with RAW, not that I ever bother to

P.P.S. that shot was 200 ISO f/8 1/250, I probably could have just about got away with 100 ISO and knocking it up another f stop to get less noise and more sharpness. A modern DSLR would have had less noise, more dynamic range and 4 times as many pixels to play with.

Nice, and it's the right colour too

Cheers

Cris

Yes, but that is NOT the color (oops, sorry, colour) that my moon was when I photographed it. Due to dust or smoke in the air, it really was of a yellow-orange tint.

tanstaafl.

We get some really impressive red moons out here under the right conditions. Typically, our moon is a yellowish-orange also, unless it happens to be pretty far above the horizon. Those are the same conditions that give us some of the best sunsets in the world

This was about the best I could get. One downside of only using my phone as a camera is missing out on some shots. The upside is that I always have a camera though.

This was taken riding a ferry during a recent motorcycle trip. The full moon had just peaked above the hills on the Washington side while we were approaching the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Really stunning sight, especially with the reflection in the water. Still keeping the bad photo in my collection, as it's at least still a connection to the memory in my mind of that evening.

In... Arizona, you say? Are they by any chance purple and red and yellow and on fire? Do the clouds catch the colours everywhere?

Peter

.

That second one looks like a Joshua tree to me, in which case you can't have been so far from Arizona...

Peter

Yes, both were taken from Joshua Tree National Monument/Park/whatever. Completely clear skies all day, then at sunset some thin clouds form to really help light things up.

But hey, not too many miles to the East, the sunsets really get spectacular!

Seeing as how Joshua Tree is still in the Southwest, and even in the same Sonoran Desert, it still qualifies as 'out here'.

Yes! That was all very much tongue in cheek, to help illustrate how nice some of the sunsets down that way can look!

We've seen equally good/better ones around the planet, though. But in JTree, it seemed to happen consistently every night (in October, various years).

Cheers