Tips for New Fuji F31fd Digital Camera User???

[mrmax]

Ok after years of doing nothing with photography, letting my wife take the pictures with cheap point and shoot cameras. My son has inspired me to take an interest in digital photography. He has been traveling all over the world with his Canon A95 taking beautiful shots, I broke down and bought a Fuji F31fd. When I was his age traveling I used an Olympus 35RC Rangefinder (http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~yue/misc/35RC.html), that camera suited my minimalist approach to things, today's compact digital cameras remind me of my old Olympus.

Basically everything I learned about photography to use the Olympus effectively I pretty much forgot.

I would appreciate any tips on digital photography and using the F31 or F30.

[P_Schneider]

Welcome mrmax,
Well you can check out the photo threads for specific settings on shots you like. I use firefox as a browser with the EXIF viewer plugin. A simple right click lets me view all the info about the photo such as the camera settings at the time of the shot. I posted a "best practices (http://www.dcresource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26764&page=10)" for the S6k in it's photo thread and since they both share a lot of the same features and abilities a lot of the info should apply. Search around a bit, enjoy the photos, and when you have specific questions feel free to ask.

[mattdm]

I know it's probably poor taste to link to a competing forum, but I just saw a really good post on this over at dpreview. The poster is responding to someone asking about the S6000, but actually gives answers based on experience with the F30:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1012&message=21872112

[Bajie]

I just got my F31 today & played around with it a little while the battery is charging.

A few thoughts from the maiden pics:
- The high iso really extends flash range! It picked up wall-textures from 10 feet away.
- Camera is really aggressive in bumping up ISO. None of my auto shots were at ISO 100.
- It still needs image stabilization. I took pics of a bookshelf from a foot away and there was some blur at iso 800. I have a steady hand, too.
- The "stabilization" mode seems to be a simple ISO3200 shortcut so far, so not very useful.

[Bajie]

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1012&message=21872112


Thanks, that's a great guide that will save me lots of experimentation. I'm glad we're above silly forum rivalry :)
Altho that forum needs to keep up w/ the times and show more than 1 msg per page.