Anyone have some examples and / or opinions on what’s good for cameras for photo mapping these days? Are they getting better at handling this sort of lighting?
This is from the other day hiking on a trail in swamp. As you can tell, there’s a lot of bright sunshine breaking in. Between my hiking and trying to do with the light by poor old garmin virb elite struggles to get every photo in focus.
Curious if the newer cameras handle this better. grax
Part of the reason I ask is it would be nice to better able to see the 8 ft gator that wouldn’t get out of the trail. Straight ahead out in the sun soaking it in. But that sun along with that shade makes it hard to work out. Not an easy problem for cameras to work out automatically.
Dear @allen ,
Tried to take a look at photos from your hand in other locations, but filtering on ‘alan’ only brought up this one sequence?
Looking at for example Mapillary , and assuming there’s quite a lot of light that far south : spot a number of blurred pics : one clear benefit of a newer camera would be greater light sensitivity ; the photos also seem rather high in contrast : does the Virb offer any choice in that aspect?
Pixel count for the Virb looks in the order of 7 or 8MP, e.g. the Hero10 offers almost three times that, at 23MP, will thus greatly improve details rendered.
Camera and other shops seem reluctant to offer a definite opinion on relative merits, my suggestion is to select the camera which on the spec sheet and from reviews looks best suited, order online with a 30-day money back guarantee, go out and put the desired camera through its paces over the weekend, scrutinise the result; if not pleased, email an account for the manufacturers’ attention, detailing perceived shortcomings, in case their suggestions on how to improve do not yield the hoped for result during the second weekend, invoke the money-back promise - definitely well within the 30-day period, as the shop would like to receive the camera in almost pristine condition - and note that terms and conditions may differ between jurisdictions : what applies in the UK, the Netherlands or Belgium may not hold elsewhere.
My tuppence, met vriendelijke groet (Dutch for ‘with friendly greeting’),
What you really need in this type of high-contrast (mixture of very bright and very dark patches in a single photo) conditions is a camera with high-dynamic range.
On the iOS Mapillary app at least, you can tap on any part of the screen to adjust the exposure to where you tapped it.
For example, in your case, the camera’s exposure was set to bring up the shadows, so all the bright parts of the image were all blown out and over exposed.
At that moment, if you were to tap on the bright parts of the image (on iOS app) then the app would have readjusted the exposure to highlights and would bring down the exposure so the gator would be more clearly visible.
But to answer your question, there is no digital camera that can match the dynamic range capability of the human eye (which has a range of 14-15 stops). So, you’ll just have to be mindful of the limitations of the camera and adjust the exposure dynamically as you are capturing the images.
Thank you to both of your for taking the time. That’s helping me better understand the issue and what is in play. I’ve been doing more hiking + bringing the cameras so the limitations of those old garmin virbs really get exposed ( pun intended #rimshot ).
I would like to get some better photos for mapping. One thing from my point of view with hiking is it’s hard to know if a trails’ worth it. Hate to drive an hour for a hike only for it to turn out the trail’s underwater, not well maintained, etc. The way I see, it’d be nice to cruise through the trail in pictures and see what it looks like.
And it’d be ncie to have some better pictures. Gotta hand it to those old garmins, still get a couple hours of pics ( GPS + every other second ) out of those batteries.
@koninklijke, if you search for “allen” that’ll do the trick.
Here’s another one that turned out well.
Dear @Allan,
Whether I mistyped in the filter box, on the forum, or both ?
The linked picture shows up on the map south of Jacksonville, Florida ; only five allans to choose from in the drop-down, none of those have any pics in Florida ; please see Mapillary ?
Yours baffled,
Allen > allan