Cheesy Quintessence

A week and a day ago, I got a replacement for my old PowerShot A510, which my mother destroyed. I decided to settle on the PowerShot A710 IS, the first Canon A-series camera to feature an optically stabilized lens. It also features a 7.1 megapixel sensor and an amazing 6x optical zoom, which I think would be considered ultrazoom for a compact camera like this.

The first thing I did with it was try out the image stabilization. I’m quite impressed with how well it works! With some bracing (such as having my hands on a flat surface), I can actually hold the camera while exposing a photo for a whole two seconds, and still not get any blur. Now, that’s way more than IS can handle normally, but without the IS those photos would have definitely had some shake to them. However, in holding the camera, I have been able to exceed the IS’ recommended correction capabilities and take unshaken photos as slow as 1/10 of a second; it helps to have steady hands.

Those who have seen my photos know I love macros, with which I do a lot of fairly untraditional things. The macro mode on this camera amazes me; it can focus as close to as one centimeter. I’ve taken photos where the subject was practically on the lens, so close I couldn’t even (in the situation I was in) get enough light to take a good photo.

This camera has a feature I desperately wanted on my A510, called “FlexiZone.” It allows one to move the autofocus frame anywhere so the camera will know what is desired to be focused upon. Previously, one could only have the frame in the center, which made for guesswork in recomposing the photo after setting the focus. Of course, it also has full manual focus, but that’s also a bit uncertain on this sort of camera, since it only offers a slight magnification in the middle of the screen, which is normally not where the subject will be.

There are about two things I’ve been disappointed with on the camera. First of all, the camera’s brain seems to have a strong tendency to overexpose. I’d not noticed this on my A510. With the manual controls, I often take photos that the camera claims are a whole three stops underexposed, and they seem fine to me. Luckily, the exposure compensation on this camera truly does change the shutter speed from the camera’s recommendation, rather than just lightening or darkening the photo, so I don’t have to manually expose every shot I take.

The other thing I’m underwhelmed with is part of the new “my colors” feature. This new feature is kind of cute, allowing the user to accent photos by limiting them to exclusively one color, or by replacing one color with another. Unfortunately, because these features are placed in special scene modes, which are under the automatic portion of the mode dial, there’s no way to use the FlexiZone focus, nor set the shutter speed or aperture value. Why would such creative features be put in such restrictive shooting modes? It makes no sense, but then it could be argued that it makes no sense to use the camera for that when computer software would allow for more versatility.

I put my photography efforts in my subVariance gallery, so check it out!