The Demise of P4...

30 December 2010

I loved my little Nikon Coolpix P4... it photographed Sasha dolls, outfits, macros and closeups, landscapes and portraits and pretty much everything I asked it to attempt brilliantly...  in all weather conditions, pelting rain, snow, bright sunlight, indoors and out...

On Monday morning I turned on my trusty little P4 as I called her... and... she made a feeble little whirrup... flashed up "lens error" and died... I did everything remedial I could think of... I took out the battery... I changed the battery... I gave her a gentle tap with my finger... I tried again... again... then I sat down and cried... as I tried to fathom what mishap had befallen her... I couldn't remember her falling or having a knock...  But the sorry fact was... she was deader than the proverbial blue parrot (old monty python sketch)...

By the time Neil returned I was still sniffling pathetically about P4's sudden and unexpected demise...

Then we turned to D3000... many photographs later (the problem being that Sasha dolls have a lovely natural coloured skin tone but they were looking in the photos as though they had been given a very bad fake orange tan)... as I became more and more panic stricken... and mumbled something about trying to find a replacement for P4 who Nikon no longer make... Neil found a page in the David Busch's Nikon D3000 guide book about Active D-lighting... Apparently, as he informed me, the Coolpix cameras like P4 had something called Active D-lighting as well as a f2.7-5.3, 7.5-26.3mm lens that allowed them to cast light onto shadow and slightly soften colour... hence the beautiful "natural" portraits of Sasha doll...
At which point he continued to read that Nikon had recently put Active D-lighting onto a couple of their recent DSLR's the D3000, D300 and D3... How lucky am I that my sister decided to buy me a D3000?

Much reading and fiddling later...

At this point Neil discovered that his Compaq laptop could tell us what settings a photograph (previously taken by me of Sasha by P4) had been taken at... we realised that the Nikkor 18-55mm f4.5-6 lens couldn't get the effect that my little point and shoot could with her lens ability of f2.7...

Then I remembered that the Nikkor 35mm prime lens (very recent arrival) was f1.8 so we took it out of the (new specially padded) camera bag (don't want any more accidental deaths of camera equipment) and tried it with the active d-lighting on at an ISO of 100 (P4 was able to take them at ISO 50)... and we had success... Never was I so glad that I had bought that prime lens... Of course I won't be able to zoom in and out for the photos but I will get used to that...

I am also very glad that I have a DH who has excellent ability at fathoming out the deeper workings of technical equipment...  and thankfully had a day off work on holiday...

At this point... bedtime reading has now become a manual on using D3000... I think this will be a steeper learning curve than I had realised... until very recently I just turned on my camera, pointed and pressed the button, and then downloaded the image...  now I am learning about apertures, shutter speeds, etc... but I am so glad that I have my Christmas present camera already (thank you Pip, mum and Steffi) so that I can actually take photographs for my website and blogs...  I think come Christmas Eve, I shall wrap D3000 and its lenses up inside their camera bag and pop a pretty bow on top...  and out of the huge spectrum of entry level DSLR's what were the chances that my sister Pip would choose one with the ability to take images using the Active D-lighting that I had become so used to taking for granted unknowingly...

I thought I would blog about her demise as she was behind the majority of the photographs on Sasha Doll Style and Sasha Doll Style Blog .