A perceptive take on Pogue's digital camera reviews from
The Online Photographer:
Pogueisms
David Pogue of the New York Times must be extremely knowledgeable about computers, because every time he writes about cameras he performs a flawless imitation of someone who doesn't know much to start with and yet doesn't bother to keep up. This time out he writes about a 60-fps Fuji (the Exilim EX-F1) which allows you to take up to 60 pictures at once and then edit them later, so you can pick the best one. Our correspondent calls this "a time machine." The miracle is illustrated with a "slide show" consisting of 25 pictures of a gymnast taken with too low an ISO and too slow a shutter speed…making it immaterial which frame one might go back and pick after the fact, since all of them are blurry anyway.
Think that's bad? How about this: "The historic feature of Sony’s Alpha A300 and A350 digital cameras is the back-panel screen. It lets you frame the shot before you take it, just as you can on pocket cameras; you don’t have to hold the camera up to your eye." Back-panel screen? Does he mean the LCD? And that long locution "frame the shot before you take it...don't have to hold the camera up to your eye" is apparently the Pogueism for live view. Reminds me of a refrain I used to harp on with high school students: "I want nouns." (No thingamajiggies; no whatchamacallits.) And not just nouns, but the right nouns. The ones that are fit to print. I've never heard anyone call an LCD on a DSLR the "back-panel screen" before. Is that like the look-through hump (prism) and the grabbable thick place (handgrip)?
I won't even get into that "historic" claim.
In almost thirty years of photographing one thing I have learned is that using automatic film advance in an effort to capture the "decisive moment" is not the way to go... Instead, learn how to use the camera, anticipate the moment and then click the shutter. There will not only be more "keepers," there will be more very special pictures that will amaze friends and family. And regarding those 16GB memory cards... from what I can tell the larger-capacity cards tend to have more problems and when one goes bad you can lose a bunch of images, which is why I have stuck to using 2GB cards. If a card goes south on me I won't lose all the pictures of my dream vacation, just some of them...
