Castell Coch Forest With CCD Cameras!

For the first time in many years, I took the group out, but I did not take my Fujifilm X-T3 or my OIympus E-PL8. No, I decided two of my latest CCD cameras, the point and shoot Fujfilm J150W and the compact Canon G11. The price difference between these two on release was huge, with the Fujifilm being a quality point and shoot for the masses, while the G11 is an all singing, all dancing mini-DSLR!

Castell Coch is a cool place to visit if you’re in Cardiff. It’s a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle that looks like something out of a fairy tale. You can explore the rooms, admire the paintings and furniture, and learn about the history of the place. It’s also surrounded by beautiful woodland (which we explored), so you can enjoy a nice walk or a picnic after your visit. Castell Coch is definitely worth checking out if you’re into castles and stuff.

We did not enter the castle this time, although I have photographed it in the past. The weather was overcast, with occasional rain and the forest was dark! The Fujifilm only shoots at fully automatic, but I set the exposure compensation to -1/3EV as it tends to over-expose. I also set the Canon to -1/3EV, although it was set to aperture priority mode. Images have had nothing changed to their colours, although they have had exposure changes and when needed, contrast added in Darktable.

Here are the Fujifilm J150W images from the day.

Most of my images were however taken with the Canon G11, as I did not realise my battery was so low on the Fujifilm. Here are the images from the Canon G11 from the day.

The images turned out very nice for both cameras, although I did have to delete a number of Fujifilm images, which were not salvageable as they suffered badly from camera shake. The darkness of the combination of rain and being under a canopy of trees was just too much, however, the images that used flash were fine.

Both cameras focused quickly and accurately, especially when I remembered to put them into macro mode for the minimum focus shots of insects and some plants. Noise is of course there, but it is nowhere near as bad as I thought it might have been in those conditions, and in some ways, it is in no way as ugly as that caused by my Fujifilm X-T3 on the times I do suffer noise from pushing it too far. Of course, in this day and age, noise can easily be removed if you need to. I did not remove noise from the images.

I hope you liked the images! I have built up a little collection of CCD point and shoot cameras now, and over the next few weeks I will be doing a YouTube series and chatting about each one. They really are better than we remember!

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Mark.