My New Camera

I received an Advent present on Monday (a day late, but still appreciated!).
A new digital camera!!! It’s a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS. The IS stands for Image Stabilizer, which means the camera compensates for your hand shaking or not being completely steady when you shoot.

It’s a point-and-shoot camera, but with good capabilities (click on the Specifications tab in the above link to see all it can do). The zoom is only 3x optical (and 4x digital), which equates to roughly 38-114mm in a 35mm film camera (slight wide-angle to moderate zoom), but it has a macro capability (close-focus), able to focus as close as 3cm from the subject, which my old (film) camera didn’t and which I was really wanting. And lots of special shooting modes (portrait, foliage, snow, beach, sunset, fireworks, aquarium, etc) and photo effects (vivid colours, sepia, B&W, darker skin tone – good for photos of Button!). It also has motion detection technology, so if you’re taking pictures of a moving object, the camera automatically adjusts exposure levels and ISO (equivalent to film speed) to create sharp, clear images. (Of course, if you want to have some blur in your picture, you’ll need a different camera!) This review gives a good overview of the SD1100’s capabilities and performance.

It’s quite compact and light, but the viewfinder / photo screen is a decent size (takes up 2/3 of the back of the camera!). Mine is the Swing Silver one, so fairly ordinary, no fancy-dancy “Rhythm & Blue” or “Bohemian Brown.” (Those would have been more expensive, no doubt.)

I have yet to really test it out, but will soon. So from now on you can hope to see photos of things as they happen, rather than a month or two later!