I hope to keep posting updates, but there won't, alas, be any photographs until after my birthday on 22/12. Reason being that I have part-exchanged my old Fuji S7000 for a brand spanking new Fuji HS20 - and most of the part-exchange price is actually my birthday and Christmas presents. In some ways I am sorry to see the S7000 go - it has been a great, and very reliable, camera. But it was getting old, and it seemed wise to replace it while it was still working and worth something.
The HS20, having had a quick play in order to check that it works properly, seems like a worthy replacement. It has a number of improvements, and refinements, over earlier models. A few of the 'improvements', such as Cat and Dog recognition (seriously, I kid you not!), seem like gimmicks, and I can't imagine ever using them, however clever the technology behind them may seem. Others will probably prove very useful - though not all will be equally useful for photographing figures. The photograph below is a case in point. The new camera has a seemingly rather competent image-stabilisation thingy.
The lens is a 4.2 - 126 mm zoom, equivalent to 24-720mm on a 35mm camera. This photograph was taken, hand-held, at full zoom (126 mm, or equivalent to 720 mm). It's far sharper than I dared to hope. It doesn't mean I won't be using a tripod or bean-bag, but it does show that things have moved on a lot - without image stabilisation, this shot would be simply impossible, there would be far too much camera-shake for it to be practical.
There are a very few things I'm not so keen on, and which made me stop and think about the purchase for a week or three. Plastic threads on the tripod socket is one - it seems that in order to get metal threads these days, you have to splash out for a DSLR. I can't see the sense in that, but plastic tripod threads appear near-universal now in 'bridge' or 'prosumer' cameras. I just hope I don't strip them - though I don't use the camera with a tripod much. At home, photographing figures, I usually find a bean-bag more convenient. For 'general' photography, I rarely, if ever, use a tripod. The tripod really only comes into its own when photographing games at wargames shows, for which I suspect it will continue to be essential - I can't imagine that the image stabilisation thing will cope with the two-second exposures I often end up using at the likes of the Partizan show in Newark - not that I'd be unhappy to be proved wrong!
I did look at cameras from other manufacturers, but they didn't seem to offer much that the Fuji didn't, and the HS20 has much in common with the S7000, so it should take me less time to become competent in using it than if I'd changed manufacturer.