Peter's Blog

My Canon Powershot S1 IS has a panoramic picture mode that allows you to take a series of photos and then use a piece of software on PC to glue them together. I had my first go with it today and I am really impressed.

This is a picture from my mum's balcony, taken round a 180 degree sweep:

The camera has a special mode to support this: when taking the photos you see half the previous photo in the viewfinder which makes it easier to take the next photo. The PC software does all the stitching automatically, no manual tweeking or aligning things to the nearest pixel. You can see half a car and a bent line in the road and that's useful to bear in mind when deciding what to photo.

Subscribed to flickr, todays 5 minute wonder. Added new block on the right with random baby picture.

I tried to subscribe to Flickr yesterday but they were having severe problems, I got a fatal error when I tried to subscribe and they seemed to be having bad loading problems. They seem to be victims of their success. If flickr delays my page loads then the photo goes.

I take photos every day with the Canon Powershot S1 IS, I've learnt how to get it to autofocus most of the time and the new Uniross 2000mA/h batteries have been in it a week now without a recharge, no problems there, well worth £8.

Still taking plenty of photo's with new camera. At first I was concerned about battery life but the batterys seem to have settled down to lasting a good day and 30-40 photo's, predominantly flash with lots of attempts to autofocus.

I was looking through a catalogue for some new NiMH AA rechargable batteries for it and suddenly became aware of the fact that these come in various capacities: the ones I had been using are 1300mA/hours but they can be anything up to 2300mA/hours. I went out and bought a set of 2000mA/hours for £8 and am looking forward to 50% longer battery life. This demonstrates one of the coolest features of the camera: it uses batteries you can buy anywhere.

Regarding the autofocus, I think my problem is that I want to use 10x zoom all the time to take pictures of my daughter where her face fills the frame. The problem is that at 10x zoom the camera seems to be reluctant to focus to less than 1m: even selecting manual focus, it won't let me set the focus any closer unless I reduce the zoom a bit. Taking photo's like this the pictures look ok on the camera with it's tiny LCD but when copied to pc they are embarrasingly out of focus.

When the pictures are in focus they are very nice:

I've decided I don't want to use the Canon PC software if I can avoid it. Both the camera and Jasc Paintshop Photo Album support WIA, a windows thing to handle scanners and cameras. When the Canon software was installed it made itself the default handler when the camera connected. I found that this could be changed as follows:

• connect camera to computer via USB
• Go to conrol panel/Scanners and Cameras. Open Scanners and Cameras itself by double-clicking on it, don't open the camera.
• right click on the camera in the Scanners and Cameras list and select 'Properties' (Note: the camera will not be listed if it is not connected).
• select the 'Events' tab and configure the 'Camera Connected' event to launch Paintshop Photo Album (or whatever you want to download)
• press ok.

Unfortunately this seems to bypass whatever it is that automatically rotates portrait mode photo's to the correct orientation, when copied to the pc they are on their sides. The Canon Powershot S1 IS does have an orientation sensor and all photo's are displayed the right way up on the viewfinder and when the camera is connected to a TV. I think I'm happy to deal with the chore of rotatng photos than use the Canon software.

I am starting to rely on Paintshop Photo Album to organise my 750M of photos. It handles them easily and it uses real directories on the PC, it does not try to hide nasty technicalities like the file system from me.

Been experimenting with the focusing of my new Canon Powershot S1 IS. I am working out how get good autofocus. I have discovered the following:

• The autofocus struggles at maximum (10x) optical zoom. It locks on better at lesser zooms.
• It is also worse when close to the subject (< 1m) which may be below the min autofocus distance.
• Autofocus triggers in ernest when the shutter is pressed halfway down.
• There is a white square box within the viewfinder that turns green when the autofocus locks and yellow when it gives up.
• I have seen it turn green when the picture was blatantly out of focus.
• It is possible to focus by finding a high-contrast edge a similar distance away to whatever I am trying to photo, locking on it by half-pressing the shutter, moving to my subject and fully pressing the shutter.

I am not so worried about the focusing as I was in my last post. It is not so totally automatic that you never have to think about it.

More notes:

• It was not unknown for my old Nikon Coolpix 2500 pictures to be out of focus.
• Forcing the Canon to 400 ASA it is possible to take acceptably grainy photos indoors with no flash. The resulting pictures are nicer as the lighting is more natural.
• The batteries go flat in about 2 hours. Will buy an alternate set of 4xAA NiMH's for it, maybe two sets.

New camera came today Bullet points:

• the reviews I read mentioned poor autofocus in low light conditions. This is worse than I expected, low light seems to mean indoor, it's about 50-50 whether the autofocus will mess up and give you a blurry picture. All is not lost as the camera does have manual focusing but it would be nice not to need it so much. This is the main problem with the camera.
• flash is very powerful: lights the room, yet catches skin tones and does not make subject look pale
• Zoom does not really magnify, it's not like a telescope zoom even if it is 10x optical.
• came with batteries which lasted about two hours playtime. May be because I was running it with both the LCD and Electronic Viewfinder running at the same time, showing the same picture.
• lots of buttons dotted around means a lot can be done without using menus: e.g. manual focus button under 2nd finger left hand. Quicker to set things up than my old Nikon.
• supplied software for pc is unimpressive assortment of utilities. Dialogs display with gross text positioning errors, you select an option from a menu and things appear to freeze while an application slowly launches another application, the utility I found to download pictures does not seem to let you pick which you want to download or here to put them.
• can change shutter sounds etc to silly birds tweets, boing noises and the like.
• nice pictures (when they are in focus):
  

Verdict: I am happy with it so far.

Ordered Canon Powershot S1 IS. Why:

• good reviews including this personal one
• 10x optical zoom + 3x digital + useful image stabilisation (38-380mm telephoto)
• uses compact flash so no need for new cards + readers
• uses AA batteries so no need for proprietary ones (rare and expensive)
• real viewfinder (view through lens like an SLR, not just a plastic window)
• can swivel lcd for self portraits, holding overhead etc.
• takes movies as AVI files

Bought from Amazon to save £70 wrt high street price.

Waiting for post

Downloaded user manual pdf from Canon US web site. UK web site wants to charge for manual.