At Peace with this Camera

I've had several successful shots with this Canon PowerShot in the past week, and I think I'm starting to see how it will be a nice complement to my photography kit. There are some things that it does that the D40 does not:

You can shoot through the viewfinder and the LCD. The D40 LCD is strictly for viewing photos and working through menus. I use the LCD a lot with the PowerShot, and that's all fine but really it doesn't matter when I'm shooting other things so much. It's when I'm shooting myself that I find the PowerShot's LCD so valuable...it swivels around and can be facing the front of the camera. So when I'm doing self-portraits, like the one yesterday, I can swivel it around to face the front and compose the shot that way.

The other thing I really like is the self-timer functions. There is a custom self-timer part where you can tell it the amount of delay you want before it starts shooting and you can even have it do multiple shots. So for instance, when I did the shot yesterday with Mensa Boy, I set it to delay 10 seconds and then shoot of 3 photos. I'm glad I did because the one I ultimately settled on was the middle shot.

I also like the fact that you can have it display the histogram all the time in the viewfinder of LCD. So instead of shooting a photo and then seeing the resulting histogram, I can watch the histogram as I adjust aperture and shutter to see how the photo is going to turn out BEFORE I push the button. That's kind of cool.

I am finding that I use the Manual setting almost exclusively, unless I am shooting action shots. Then I use the "action shot" scene mode. For some reason I am not able to (so far) to duplicate the setting the camera uses in "action" mode when I using it in Manual.

So I think I'd recommend this camera to just anyone, as long as they download a noise reduction software when they buy it. The camera produces noisy, grainy photos in just about any situation that is not outside in broad daylight. If it weren't for Imagenomic Noiseware, I'd probably still be buying and returning cameras, trying to find one that worked.

Here's a photo I took in Jazzercise yesterday morning. I had to use the sports mode to get her in focus. Instructor Kelly is performing a short cheer she made up to promote our holiday attendance game.