steven lundberg

Thanks Zane and Don for your help. Since the first photos in this series came out with no pink cast to the clouds, and considering your comments, I'll deduce for now the Olympus SP-350 doesn't handle the heat very well, and plan accordingly from now on. Hopefully when I upgrade to DSLR in the near future this won't be a concern. In the mean time I may consider packing a cool-pak type container to transport the camera in during this kind of weather

Equipement: Olympus SP-350 8 megapixel

 

While traveling between appointments this afternoon I stopped for an hour at a

subject I'd been wanting to photograph for some time. Today where I live it was

103 degrees F. My gear was in the cab of my truck while traveling, and while at

my appointment. I hiked ten minutes up to the spot, wiped the sweat off my

glasses, set up my tripod and started shooting. After about 30 minutes and

several photos later, my LCD display went zeros on me, showing pink and gray

vertical stripes, and the camera would not shut off, nor would the lens collapse

back in to the camera body. I pulled the batteries, reinstalled them, and all

went well for another 10 minutes. Again I tried the batter cure, but nothing

worked, and the lens remained stuck open. After arriving home to the AC, and

eating some dinner, I hooked the camera up to my computer and my household

current, and after a couple of tries it fired up, the lens closed, and I

transferred my raw files. Upon examination of my files I noticed part way

through that the white clouds had started turning pink, as well as some edges on

the photos. I'm relatively new to digital, and my old OM-1 went through 30+

years of both ends of temperature and weather extremes without problem, except

for the camp out in 20 below temps (I don't even want to talk about the wind

chill that night), and my problems there were with the film and the battery.

What I'm wondering is, can the electronics, and/or the ccd sensors overheat in

the kind of conditions I was working in today (I noticed the batteries felt very

warm), would the pink color shift in the white areas be due to heat noise, could

this have caused any permanent damage to my camera, am I doing something

technically wrong for digital shooting, or is this more likely some other

problem with my camera the I need to have serviced? Sorry about the lengthy

message, but thought it might save a few questions. Thanks for any help,

experiences, or advice you can provide.

 

Regards, Steven.<div></div>

I've been shooting RAW with my new Olympus S350 for a couple of months now, and have used both the PS import plugin and the Olympus "Master" software that came with my camera to convert files to .tif and .psd formats. As I understand it, tiff and jpeg formats process the raw information they get from the camera sensors, and this processing results in various levels of information loss, or degradation. RAW is just that,ALL the raw information. The advantage is YOU get to decide what kind of and how much processing your image gets.

 

The Olympus Master software does a quick job, in batches, of converting photos to tiff, but it only converts them to 8 bit. The PS import plugin keeps the 16 bit format, but I've not been able to find a way yet to import more than one at a time, and therefore am unable to take advantage of the batching features in PS. It's a long and painful process after a lengthy shoot to convert this way. The quality and depth of information I'm left to work with is worth it though, at least to me.

 

One last thought. Jpeg's are processed quite a bit by the camera and are usually ready for viewing, while raw files are chock full of information that's ready to be processed, and usually won't look as good as the jpegs comparatively just out of the camera. This wouldn't be a valid or useful comparison.

 

Steven