C'est la Guerre - Colophon

[Canon PowerShot A10] The photographs were almost exclusively take by my humble 1.3 megapixel Canon PowerShot A10. I purchased this camera specifically to take pictures of my army, and figured that I didn't need anything fancy to generate a bunch of pictures for the web. The keys to choosing this camera were that it was cheap (about $180 10/2002) yet still highly rated by those who have purchased it, as well as having a 3x optical zoom for better close-up shots. About the only aspect of the A10 that is a bit annoying is that it uses four AA batteries which it eats like candy when you are taking a lot of pictures. (Such as when you are doing a photoshoot of your army, for example.) I bought eight NiMh rechargeable batteries and a fast charger. When doing a photoshoot I would drain the batteries in about an hour, which was just a little longer than it took to recharge the other set of batteries, so it ended up working well.

The A10 seems to be discontinued, with the A40 being Canon's current introductory offering with a 3x zoom. It is is available for about $235. I also note that Fuji currently offers the FinePix 2800 with a 6x optical zoom for about $275 which seems to be well-liked by those who have bought it, so this might be a good choice if I was buying one today. (All prices were for October, 2003, so of course they are out of date by now.)

We also have a good SLR camera, the Cannon Elan EOS IIE. (This camera is very similar to the Canon EOS Rebel.) I had been thinking I would use this camera to take some of my army pictures, and purchased a set of diopters for it. (These are a set of three fairly inexpensive magnifiers that screw onto the camera lens.) However, the instantaneous feedback one gets with a digital camera compared to the multi-day feedback entailed with developing film for a standard camera and the necessity of scanning the printed photos resulted in my going almost entirely digital. The digital camera I really wanted was the Canon D30 since it takes the same lenses as my SLR camera, but it would set me back at least $1700 even today. This camera also appears to be discontinued, replaced by the Canon D60, which goes for a minimum of $2000

[Photography setup] When taking the photos, I used a pair of 500 and 250 Watt floodlights that my parents gave me for Christmas. The lamps are labelled as "daylight", which I believe implies a tungsten filament. They are also labelled with a lifetime of 3 hours, but they aren't too expensive - about $3-4 US each. A typical photoshoot setup is shown in the picture and was taken at my parent's house. (This must be one of those extremely rare pictures taken with the SLR since it shows the digital camera.) I found that placing the lights as high as possible had the best results and resulted in a minimum of shadows.

The photos were taken with a resolution of 1280 x 960 pixels. I bought a 64 megabyte memory card to supplement the standard 8 megabyte card so that I could take a lot of pictures without having to download them to the computer. This was critical as none of my photoshoots took place at home but when we were visiting friends or family on vacation. For the close-up shots, it was important that I used the camera's "macro" setting. I found that the the best pictures were with an f-stop of 4.5 or 4.8, the pictures losing resolution with smaller numeric f-stops. (The A10 has a range of 2.8 - 4.8.) My notes also recorded that I used the self-timer mode (imposes a delay of 10 sec to eliminate any shaking caused by depressing the shutter button), auto white balance as the color compensation setting, and bracketed the exposure compensation by taking photographs at 0, -1/3, and -2/3 EV.