On this trip we took along two Olympus C-2100UZ digital cameras. The UZ stands for ultra-zoom, a tag used because the camera has a zoom lens that has a 10 power range. As a wide angle lens, it is equivalent to a 37mm lens on a 35mm camera, while at full zoom it corresponds to 370mm, a very long telephoto. Those long telephotos are hard to hold steady and sharp pictures are generally only possible in bright sunlight when you can use a high shutter speed. The C-2100UZ overcomes this difficulty by incorporating a mechanical stabilization device in the lens. This device uses tiny gyroscopes to detect movement of the camera and adjusts the optics to compensate (within limits).

The older of these two cameras locked up while I was taking pictures at Rocamadour and the rest of the trip was shot with a single camera. Maybe that's why we only brought back 2,000 pictures instead of 2,500. The failure was a bad power board, a common failure of the first production run of this camera. Many owners suspect that Olympus got a batch of bad components, did not detect them during manufacture, and decided not to issue a recall when the problem became obvious. The problem has not cropped up in later cameras. Olympus charged me $294 to repair this since my camera was three months past its warranty date.

On this trip we had a Sony laptop along that performed flawlessly. We were using it for navigation in conjunction with a Garmin GPS receiver and in the evening we would transfer all of the day's pictures to the computer's hard disk and then make a backup copy on a writable CD. 

For links to digital photography sites on the web, please refer to my digital photography links page at http://www.peacham.com/travel/photography.htm

Photo editing

We did our best to get the image just as we saw it, but that wasn't always exact. With digital photography you can do quite a bit of fixing up on your computer back home. Here are some examples:

The pictures that we took were all 1600 x 1200 pixels, but in order to make it convenient for people to download them without losing too much detail, I decided on a web size of 1024 x 768 and a higher degree of compression. So, for each picture, here are the steps I performed: