Koi Eels of Japan - © Copyright 2012 by William Beem
Last night, I decided to try using my Nikon Coolpix P7000 to get some auto-exposure bracket shots for HDR images. Think of this as a Proof of Concept experiment. The P7000 is capable of shooting brackets of five exposures, which is generally sufficient for HDR. Since my Nikon D700 seems to attract unwanted attention at times, I was curious to see if anyone paid attention to me using this setup. Also, I wanted to test the quality of the results.
The good news is that it’s significantly lighter! If you’ve ever lugged around a full-frame camera with an f/2.8 zoom lens, you know it comes with some heft. In comparison, the P7000 was lightweight and packed a zoom range equivalent from 28-200mm on a full frame camera. The trade-off for that is that it has shutter lag and the zoom control is a bit twitchy, I never got it exactly where I wanted. The other issue is that it’s a pain to focus. In fact, I preferred the bracket I shot just before the one I made above because it didn’t have that family posing for a picture. Then again, it was also slightly out of focus. That’s why I had to grab another set.
A recent firmware update fixed a complaint many had about this camera. You couldn’t use the auto-exposure bracket with the self-timer. Good news, folks. Get the new update from Nikon that shipped in December for the P7000. I set the self-timer for a 2-second delay and then it faithfully ran through it’s brackets.
I think my experiment worked. Nobody approached me or commented about my camera. Tourists didn’t ask me to take their photo. Nobody kicked me out of the park. Other than needing to work a bit more on the mechanisms of the camera, I’d rate this experiment as a mild success. While I don’t want to replace my D700 with a point & shoot, it seems like a viable alternative when I want to fly a little under the radar.
