Hi Paul,

Thanks for your thoughts. The main reason I thought of displaying the
camera monitor signal (real-time) on a larger display was that when I'm
shooting in bright surroundings, the LCD screen can be swamped by background
brightness. This happened yesterday, while I was shooting on the grounds of
National Cathedral, so I just used the eye viewer instead of the flip-out
lcd screen, and I was pretty well able to compensate. I'm a complete
amateur here - no professional photo credentials, and I was surprised at how
well the FZ30 did in lower light, inside the cathedral. If you're
interested, my shots are at:

http://www.scottspeck.com/pictures/n...ral/index.html

My longest exposure times were seven seconds. My main failure was in
properly exposing stained glass windows where the window is situated between
me and the sun (bad mistake!). I've learned that I should shoot the window
(from inside the church) with the sun being relatively behind me, at least
until I learn otherwise.

I also want to learn how to build composite images by piecing together
sections of images (of arbitrary shape) that are each exposed properly. For
example, take a short exposure of a stained glass window, then a longer
exposure (to properly illuminate the stone structure around the window),
then build a composite image.

Have a nice day,
Scott


"Paul Allen" "paul dot l dot allen at comcast dot net" wrote in message
...
Scott Speck wrote:
Hello, Everyone,

I've found that when the light is too low for my FZ30's autofocus to work
properly, I need to perform a manual focus. However, this can be
difficult when using the LCD screen onboard the camera. My question
is -- why not have a "VGA out" jack on the camera into which could plug a
pair of lcd goggles? You could have full vga resolution with a huge
angular field of view (through the goggles) played from the camera
through the lcd goggles. One could then put on the goggles and hold the
camera far away from oneself, swiveling it in all directions but still
"seeing what the camera sees" with ease. Focusing would be much easier
then, too. Does this capability exist, or is it on the horizon for new
cameras?

Hmmm... Several things here. First, small-sensor cameras like the FZ30
don't do well in low light. Second, I understood that the FZ30 could
increase the gain on the display in low light. Does that not help? And
finally, what makes you think an external LCD would improve things?
Sure, it would be cool, but I can't imagine a camera maker thinking that
was a marketable feature worth a higher price.

With digital SLR's, this might be even MORE useful, for super-fast lenses
that are really tough to focus manually due to limited depth of field.
Looking at a 2" LCD screen, determining perfect focus is darn difficult.
But I bet such focusing would be much easier when viewing the image
real-time through a much larger screen -- either lcd goggles, or piped
directly into a laptop (or desktop, depending on where you are at the
time) to view the image at larger size.

Not possible with SLR's, since the sensor doesn't see the image until
you click the shutter.

Keep dreaming, Scott. You'll come up with the Next Big Thing sooner or
later.

Paul Allen