Finding the Cost of Freedom

...photographic freedom, that is.

For me it has arrived in the form of a nifty little pocketable digicam from Fuji, the F31fd. The "fd" tagged onto the end stands for "face detection" and I could pretty much care less about that. What initially attracted me to this cam was its outstanding performance at high iso.

Fuji have created a series of F cameras (F10, F20, F30, F31fd, F40) that literally break the mold regarding high iso performance. Most digicams are good up to maybe iso 200 before the images begin to drown in their own noise... these Fuji's deliver results up to iso 800 that look better than most competitors at 200.

Today's image was taken at iso 800. And although it may not be the cleanest file I could have had (I could have used a DSLR) it was a spur of the moment shot taken during a quiet moment beneath the bridge during a local festival this past weekend. The shot was 1/4 of a second at f4, taken handheld, after dark, and that alone is cause enough for pause. Until now this just wasn't possible with a digicam.

Oh, and no noise reduction software was employed. I did jerk the color around a bit in PP, but that's all I felt the need to do for web viewing.

The thing I like most about this cam, though, is it's size. It's not much larger than a deck of cards and that makes it easy to carry everywhere, all the time. And the battery life? Supposedly it's rated to around 500 images or better on a charge. Now that's freedom.