Photographing the moon at night

The camera has not problem photographing the moon in a bright day in Auto mode. At night, the camera might just record a featureles glare of disk. Here is a photo of the moon just shot today at 7:50pm December 27, 2012. Instead of the flat glowing disk I usually get, I get the "man on the moon" in P or Programmed mode using the EV setting of -1.5! That's right! -1.5 with a negative sign. That is counterintuitive, but it works!

Here is a cropped image of the moon photo above. Here we see the familiar features!

The information displayed for this image says

ISo	320
F. No.	4.5
Shutter	1/90
Flass	OFF
Photo size	4320x3240

That is not my best photo of the moon at night. Here is one with an EV value of -2.0!, and taken on the night of December 24, 2012.

Photo information: ISO 80, speed 1/250, f5.1 december 24, 2012.

Buy inexpensive backup batteries at 5th floor of SM Annex!

You should not get mad at the strange battery indicator of the Samsung which does not show the gradual losss of power while using the camera. What you should do is to have at least two extra batteries on hand when that happens! Buy your battery backups at Battery Channel Corporation, located in SM North Annex, 5th floor, Quezon City. It will set you back for a low low price of P610 pesos each! Hurry as they frequently run out of stock.

My Samsung WB150F is back!

I do not know where my receipt of sale was, so I was not able to take advantage of the warranty of the my Samsung camera. Instead I gave the camera to my brother, who is a Mechanical Engineer by profession and gave permission to have it opened and repair it if possible. Last Friday, he told me that he was successsful in fixing the zoom problem! What hed did was simply to move physically some of the contacts and the connectors. Maybe they were misaligned last October 15 when I went home to Bacolod. That brightened my day considerably and I was able to shoot scenes with the camera last Friday and even today. I will post links to the Facebook photo albums later. Thank you again, Nonoy Danny, you saved me a lot of money, P12,000 if I have to buy an new one. Actually prices of cameras are falling down and you can have the Samsung camera for only P9,999. I will shoot more often with this camera. I want to get the full value with it and want to write more about it in this blog.

My Samsung zoom is not working, rendering the camera useless!

I shot a lot of photos last October 5 in my flight home to Bacolod. In the evening I discovere the following message after recharging the batteries:

The zoom did not operate normally.
Insert the battery again and turn the camera on.
If the camera does not operate nomally, 
do not put excessive pressure on it and
contact the service center.

I can still view stored photos in my camera SD card. I will try to have my camera repaired at the Samsung Service Center. But I will go back to Manila in November. Meanwhile I still have my old Panasonic VG-100 camera s my main camera. Money is tight, and I may not be able to use a bigger lens camera.

Programmed mode may offer the WB-150F user finer control.

I brought my Samsung compact camera with me to Philcoa for supper. Here are some shots I took using Smart and P(program mode). The main difference is that I set the EV value to +0.3 to lighten the scene. Here are some results. The last set shows that Smart mode may display truer colors at night than P mode. The suggestion is to be able quickly take shots in varied settings, perhaps the beauty of P mode is that one can get the advantages of automated exposures but one can adjust the very important EV value.

A lucky find? A spare battery at SM Annex!

My brother and I have the same Samsung model WB-150F camera. We were looking always for a spare battery as we were only able to take fewer than 200 photos before the battery completely discharges.

Today October 1, 2012, we found on the 5th floor at the SM North Annex Buidldng that a spare battery is available! It set us back for 610 pesos. I hope the battery will last long. I am now giving it a full charge. Hope to shoo the whole day without an intervening recharging periods. (will do the recarging in the house at night only.)

The battery is not branded Samsung but has the item

number PPDC-SLB-10A. It comes with a three month warranty. Hope it holds up during the warranty period.

I tested the battery yesterday on our way home from Pampanga UP Clarkfield. The battery lasted into the whole afternoon,and had it recharged but the battery seems to have expanded dimensions. It does not spring out when you push it to extract it from the camera. It is tight-fittting. I think we might encounter problems with this spare battery in the future, for long term use but we are satisfied with it right now for the simple reason we cannot find the original Samsung battery in stores.

2,000 Pesos Price reduction for WB150F camera.

I was stunned! the camera is now selling for 9,900 pesos at Photoline, SM City Annex in Quezon City. I think Samsung may be selling a better model with more powerful zoom. In that case, it better improve the battery charging and charge indicator system. We only hope Samsung will be successful, and more consumers will take to the Samsung brand in the future!

Samsung Quick Reference Guide

This is preliminary. I am going to update this frequently.

• How do you ugrade the firmware of the samsung?
Click on Samsung.com Support for update instructions.
• The battery of Samsung discharges quickly. what can I do?
Buy a spare one. The battery information is: Samsung SLB-10A battery, 3.7V 1030mAh. Amazon sells a spare or replacement battery for 18.99USD. .

Shooting birds with the Samsung WB150F

I shoot distant birds in the maximum 18x optical zoom range of the camera. Later I crop the image using either Gimp or ImageMagick and the effect can be quite good since the camera has a high resolution of 14.2 megapixels. Here is one photo of a bird I am trying to identify:

Photographing tall trees.

How do you photograph tall trees or tall structures? Set your Samsung Wb150F to live panorama mode. Then shoot the tree vertically by pressing the shutter button while moving the camera up. Nothing can get easier than this! No excuse for excluding the tops of tall objects.

But the only con about this is that the photos are in low resolution mode!

Photo taken in University of the Philippines, Diliman campus near the College of Architecture.

Battery life is not good and battery indicator is almost useless?

It happened more than once already. The Samsung WB150F battery indicator does not show graceful exhaustion of the battery inside when the camera is ON. Instead, expect rapid discharge once it is not showing full charge (less than 3 full bars)! I suggest that owners should have an extra battery, but the unfortunate thing in the Philippines, is that no battery is sold in the malls! The specific lithium-ion battery model is

Brand	Samsung SLB-10A
Capacity	3.7 V, 1030 mAh(3.81 Wh)
Type	Li-ion battery Pile

Revisions:

September 12, 2012

I lost an opportunity to do some shooting today. The battery indicator showed threeSep full bars yet when I attempted to shoot, it suddenly showed zero bars and showed a message BATTERY EMPTY. This means this camera model sucks big time for heavy duty use!

More than condensation trails.

The high optical zooming range of 18x of this camera produces "usable" images. Here is an example. Vieweing the 14 megapixels image and zoomin on the view, I could discern the two engines and the wings!

Photo taken at Bgy. Central, Quezon City, Metro Manila on August 29. 2012. Had to upload the original photo to blogger. The facebook copy doe not have a high enough resolution!

A butterfly

UP Clark has some trees and plants planted besides a canal. It teems with fast small white butterflies and a larger black butterfly with blue-white reflecting spots atop its wings.

Welcome to my newest blog on samsung's wide body compact camera, WB150F with Wifi!

My b rother showed me his photos taken back home in homey Negros Occidental. The photos of birds though grainy is USABLE, taken with the 18x zoom lens! So I bought a new one also, just yesterday, and I am a little pleased. This camera may be my main and my Olympus VG-110 will now serve as a backup only. Still the number of photos before the battery run out was only 75, we would expect it to be more when it sill be fully recharged. The outputs are much more vivid, teetering on articifiality, but am sure it can be processed even in the camera to create extra processed copies. We will