Life At Villa Boswell

These past two weekends have provided the best of California "Indian Summer," with temperatures at the beach reaching into the mid and upper-70’s, something you’ll almost never see in the middle of July.  To add to the benefits of great beach weather, the fall season also offers fewer tourists, even though now is the best time to explore northern California beaches. Chris and I have taken Buck with us to the beach this weekend and last, spending a lovely afternoon driving up Highway One and exploring some hidden beaches.  (It’s kept us from unraveling under the stress of the El Granada Project.)  You can view the shots below in the embedded Web Album, or click on the web album title on the lower left to view it large size.

To add even more fun to this venture, I’ve been able to try out my new digital camera:  it’s a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot 650 IS.  And it cost me nothing!  I use our citicard mastercard to buy everything and pay it off at the end of the month, mainly to make financial tracking easier.  But, I signed up for "thank you" reward points, so along the way I’ve accumulated quite a few points.  All I had to do was to ask for the digital camera I wanted, and the representative told me how many points would be deducted from my account, and a week later it was in my hands!

This camera is definitely better than my Canon Digital Rebel SLR (which I’ve had for about 4 years now).  I won’t go into too much detail about it, but I can say that I’m definitely glad I stuck to my desire to have a point-and-shoot with manual over-ride features. I’m skeptical of the automatic features–I call them "dummy modes," because they just don’t get the color and exposure right, most of the time.  This powershot has about 6 more "dummy" features than the Rebel–about 10 total.  That’s impressive, but  I’m most comfortable with the shutter-priority mode, which consistently produces better shots than most auto modes.  So, this camera has a great 2" digital viewfinder which beats the pants off your typical eye view finder.  You can use the digitial preview to hold the camera away from your eye, adjusting the height of the view up or down to get better framing, and the framing it provides is 100% of the actual photo, so you see exactly what you are getting.  With a regular eye-viewfinder, your end result ends up being some larger percentage of the photo, and this can mean that powerlines and other undesireables make it into your photo. 

I also love that you can manually adjust the focus box in the viewfinder, and that there is a stabilization feature to the camera.  Together, these two features almost guarantee good focus (unless you have a speeding poodle).  You can shift the focus square on whatever part of the frame you want to have in focus, and the stabilization feature reduces shake, so that in sub-optimal lighting conditions, you still don’t get a lot of blur.  With my Rebel, I almost always had to sharpen my pictures, and this drove me nuts, especially with the tons of garden photography I do.  Not so this camera!  A few of these photos show just how very sharp this focus is.  Additionally, the shutter priority mode will literally "preview" your exposure for you when you depress the shutter button half-way, so you can instantly tell if your shot is over- or under-exposed, and adjust accordingly.  Also, exposure compensation and ISO is very easily accessed with quick buttons on the back panel, and you can flip from normal, to macro, to manual focus with another toggle.  In just one day, my photos have improved dramatically with this camera because of these key features.

The movie feature is definitely perfect for me.  I can take some cute film clips, and with a decent memory card, have some fun "moving moments" of my cat and dog at play or some other cute event, and still have a bunch of photos.  I have a 2MB card in the camera, and I’m not yet sure what the limit is.

I’d say that the only drawback to this camera is that it still has a slight "lag" in shutter response compared to the Rebel, but this lag is significantly reduced in the manual modes.  The dummy modes sort of make sure everything is "correct" before committing to the shot, so I think that’s what’s part of the lag.  Ironically, this element is something that I’m using to teach myself how to take crisper shots with better speed.  Hopefully soon, I’ll get a shot with the speeding Bucky with him in focus!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Wanderings, Geek, Pets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.