As you all know, I ordered a camera from Amazon, which turned into an adventure, with the camera order being cancelled too late for me to cancel the rest of the order, forcing me to try again. So I ordered another used camera from Amazon in condition "Used - Good", for $10 cheaper, with the specific proviso that I would be getting just the camera only, with minor scuffs. Well, all the items arrived today, by some miracle I have no clue about, and I opened the box, expecting a scuffed used camera, but what I got was a BRAND NEW UNOPENED Package! The wrap had never been taken off, and the entire package, including warranty card, manual, starter SD card, A/V cable, USB cable, and software, was there! BRAND FREAKING NEW! I guess this points to the problems of the point-and-shoot camera category. They are seriously not selling, for unsold units like this to show up in the bottom-feeder-reseller market. So I got an 8 mpxl camera with optical image stabilization, and nearly all the settings you can get in an SLR, including manual focus, program mode, and pure manual mode, for under $50. It seems my bad fortune turned into extraordinarily good fortune, in the end. I just have to get used to how this camera connects to the PC, as a scanner-type device rather than a mass-storage device.
Hey, if it works, don't fix it! I think I'm going to get an SD to USB adapter, since I have a 32 megabyte SD card that came with the camera, and I should at least do SOMETHING with it! Also there's that CDHK firmware hack for the camera so I can shoot either CDHK RAW or DNG raw format pics, as well as bracketing, for creation of HDR images.
Sweet, there's some custom firmware for the Canon Powershots that add a boatload of new features. I'll see if I can find an article on it tomorrow.
The future is now! Probably a pretty solid camera too. Kudos! Also, if you're feeling extremely ambitious and want to tweak things with your camera, here's the firmware Smersh is talking about.
Well, I took it out for my morning ride and grocery shopping. Here are the resized pics I took. This camera excels at outdoor/highly lit photography. It goes light on the noise reduction on low-light shots, so those shots tend to be somewhat "sandy" looking. With the Olympus I'd borrowed, I had to do wavelet sharpening, wavelet denoising, and "value-invert->gaussian-blur->overlay->adjust-transparency->saturation-adjustment", just to make the pics look presentable. These guys look fairly okay right out of the box...er... camera. In front of the Wood River Town Hall. Scaled down from 3264x2448 to 1280x960, but otherwise unaltered. The Madison County Transit bus station in downtown Wood River. Just down the road from here is the entrance to the Great Confluence trail, which I will tackle again some day after this miserable heat wave breaks. Again, resized same as above. And finally, the goal of my morning errand running riding. Getting milk and frozen veggies. Here's the look of different resolutions. Don't ask why I didn't do M2 size, I just skipped it due to dementia. First is a window cropped from the L size 3264x2448. Next is from the M1 size at 2592x1944, and last is from the M3 size at 1600x1200 Oh, and a better pic of just my bike, cropped from above image originals...
Now to move beyond snapshots: http://digital-photography-school.c...s-and-rules-all-new-camera-owners-should-know
For low light use a wide aperture and a slowerer shutter speed and keep your ISO down as close to 100 as possible. If you were shooting in auto mode, you probably got a lot of "grain" due to excessively high ISO settings. So basically get off auto mode and start practicing manual exposure combinations. Have fun with your Camera!
The mirror on my bike is a near cousin to the one on Peewee Herman's bike! I almost went with a Peewee-style rearview mirror! Heh-HEEHHH! and I don't want to hear that from the proud owner of a beach cruiser 3 wheeler!
ACK! That's right! You only thought about the 3 wheeler! Sorry! Anyhow, here you go, a pic without a bicycle in it. A portrait of Test Subject A, without flash in low light conditions, denoised (using hot pixel removal) then rescaled downward. I love optical image stabilization!
