Denise Goldberg's blog

Saturday, October 24, 2009

(Camera lust) satisfied

Oh! Denise was pulled in again by the desire for a new camera. Cameras are like computers, there is always something new and interesting coming out. And sometimes...

Canon announced the S90 with an approximate availability date of October. Now I know that Denise wasn't looking for another camera, but there was something about this one that tugged at her. She's quite happy with her dSLR, a Canon 40D, but she also likes to always have a little walk-around camera. Yes, you're absolutely right, she did already have one. The thing is, like most of the teeny tiny cameras, her baby camera didn't have manual settings on it. The camera did a good job of setting the settings, but sometimes Denise just wants more control. You know that about her, don't you?

No one had an exact delivery date, so Denise signed up for email notification from B&H Photo, and she also started checked around for availability. Last Friday was one of those days, and she saw that while B&H still didn't have the camera, it showed as in stock at Amazon.com. Hmmm...

That hmmm... moment didn't last too long. Denise jumped on and ordered her new toy, and it showed up on Tueday. Funny thing is, when she went back to the Amazon site later that day it was already out of stock again.

She's been wandering with this new baby camera this week. I think maybe it's time I learn to use the different camera settings. I know, I can always set this camera on automatic, but I think I'll play with the manual settings too. (You know it's really my camera, don't you? I just let Denise borrow it.) I've included two photos below, an official shot of it from the Canon web site, plus a photo of me with my new toy. It's my size camera!

--- Rover
canon s90

Rover's new camera


I did have a bit of an argument with myself over this one. I like to have a pocketable camera so I can capture images that come upon me, and I already had a small (fully automatic) camera. This one pulled me in with the ability to shoot in manual modes, and with the ability to capture images in RAW format. It wasn't a need, but it was a strong desire.

I've been walking with my new toy this week, usually in the early evening with less than spectacular light.

I had a twinge of "oh crap, what did I do!" when I looked at the first photos I shot Tuesday evening. Luckily I was shooting both RAW and JPG, and it was quite clear when I looked at the JPGs that the camera was fine but that something was going wrong when the RAW images were imported into Lightroom. The horizon wasn't right - it was strongly curved, sometimes bowing to the top of the image, sometimes to the bottom. Yikes! Then I realized that the colors were off too. I posted a thread over on Digital Grin to see if anyone else was experiencing the same oddness. I'm not alone... apparently it's a case of waiting for Adobe to incorporate converters for some recently released cameras, including my S90. I filed a support case on the Adobe site, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a fix. For now, I'm using Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP) as the first step in converting my photos to a format that is viewable online.
For anyone who is interested in an ongoing discussion about this, click to the Lightroom / Canon S90 = curved horizon thread in the Digital Grin forum.
Am I happy? Absolutely! The photos in my blog entries from Wednesday and Thursday this week were taken with my new toy. I'd say it did a nice job.

If you'd like to see more of this week's getting used to a new camera exercise, the photos are all tagged with a keyword, viewable at http://www.denisegoldberg.com/keyword/canon%20s90. Let me know what you think!