New England Fall 2006 As seen through the Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z1000 High resolution 10.1 megapixel digital camera with 2.8-inch LCD display. Companion photos to the Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z1000 product review on MacNN.com. Photographer and author: ilene hoffman 10/12/06 email: ilenesmachine-at-comcast-dot-net Replace at with @ and dot with a period in your email program.

Photo from Casio

The following photos were shot with the Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z1000 camera around 7 or 8am on a cloudy day. A monopod was used to help stabilize the camera and waterproof shoes prevented the Charles River from swamping my feet.

The Casio has an amazing 34 automatic settings you can use to set the camera for the scene you want to shoot. When I shot these fall photos I used the Autumn Leaves setting. For shots I have yet to upload, I used a number of other settings, including Action shots which reduced wind movement of the trees and Sun behind the subject. When you choose an automated setting, you cannot alter them, so if you want specific features, such as center focus or close up focus, you must set the camera manuallly. Sometimes the camera saved these settings after it was turned off and on again, and sometimes it did not. This little glitch is still a mystery to me.

The lessons learned in taking the following pictures are: Always take multiple shots of your subject; one with and one without the camera's special settings. Use a large storage card, so that you can shoot multiple exposures at the highest resolution without running out of space. Multiple shots ensures you get the picture you want or if needed, you can edit one of the photos to achieve the picture you want.

The Casio camera is set to Normal for this picture. Notice how washed out the foliage seems. The whites and grays seem normal though.	This picture was taken with the Autumn Leaves setting. Note how yellow the photo appears. The camera overcompensated for color. The gray is now brownish and the colors horribly electric.	This is the normal photo lightly edited by Ilene in Photoshop CS2. Only the levels were adjusted to show the actual color in the trees, without over compensating for the fall color. Although the bridge is a tad dark, the rest of the colors are more in line with reality, but the red and orange colors are still a little washed out.
1-normbridge_061011_481.jpg Charles River in Needham, MA	2-autumnleave_061011_480.jpg Charles River in Needham, MA	3-actualedit_061011_481.jpg Charles River in Needham, MA
	The difference between the normal setting and the Autumn Leaves setting is even more striking in this tree photo. In the photo on the left, I used the Normal setting. The tree bark is a bit too gray, and the whole photo is very washed out. In the photo on the right, I used the Autumn Leaves setting. The green leaves are acceptable, the red is close to the real color, but tree bark and background brush is much too yellow. The bark is some unearthly color too.
4-normtree_061011_604.jpg South Natick Dam, MA Built in 1934		5-autmntree_061011_600.jpg South Natick Dam, MA Built in 1934

The South Natick Dam in a once-in-a-lifetime photo, 2004.