Sony DSC-W17

First introduced by Sony in 2005, it is a 7.2 megapixel digital compact camera with a 7.9 -23.7mm (equivalent to 38-114mm in 35mm terms) Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens: Carl Zeiss also produce the lenses for Hasselblad.  It has various automatic exposure modes, but can be used manually.  The large 2.5" screen on the back is still usable in bright sunlight.  Its metal case gives it a very solid feel and it has a retro look about it.

I like to use this camera in program or manual mode.  In program mode, to help preserve the details in the highlights, I set the camera to underexpose by either .3 or .7 of a stop or sometimes slightly more depending on the contrast of the scene - the more the contrast the more the degree of underexposure.  The resulting images will be on the dark side, but the mid-tones and shadows are easily corrected by adjusting the "levels" in Photoshop.  This technique can be used with any digital camera, because digital cameras are much better at handling the shadows than they are the highlights and once the highlight details have been lost it is impossible to bring them back.

 

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