I shot some great photos of July 4th fireworks last year with my Canon S3. You can see them via the gallery page (pages 3 and 4 of the Canon S3 gallery).

The Canon S3 IS has a fireworks mode. Turn the dial to select the scene setting and then use the left/right button to select Fireworks. Hold the camera steady and snap away. It does noise reduction, so one picture every five seconds is about as fast as you can go. There is nothing else to set. The exposure time is fixed at 2s and the aperture is set to f8.

I found the best shots came from pointing the camera where the fireworks were not and then hoping that they came into the frame. If you simply accept that fireworks are faster then you are and that you will never actually "take a photo" of one going off that looks any good, things go better. I generally kept the camera zoomed quite a long way in and that worked well to eliminate lights and background objects.

In low light conditions I want to know what shutter speed I can achieve without flash, but also want the flash ready in case I need it. And I want to be able to control whether or not the flash is used without having to press any buttons allowing me to make my choice at the last second. It turns out that with a simple trick I can do all of this.

With the shutter button held down and focussed, the Canon S3 shows the shutter speed in the display. If the flash is raised, then a different shutter speed is shown, typically 1/60. With the shutter still held down, if I depress the pop-up flash just a little with my left hand, two things happen: the flash is turned off, and the shutter speed changes in the display.

So I can be ready on a subject, focussed and about to take a picture, but still easily see the difference in shutter speed between flash and no flash, and remain able to turn the flash on or off for that single image by just poking the flash unit a little.

I get quite a few people visiting this site either looking for photos of the moon, or trying to find out how to take pictures of the moon with the Canon S3.

Here is a 100% crop of one I took yesterday. It's unadjusted, so the image is fuzzy and the colors are wrong:

It was taken at 1/200 f4.5 hand-held at 12x zoom. I took three pictures and all of them turned out good.

The trick to getting a good moon photo with the S3 is to select spot metering. Access the metering choices via the FUNC menu and select Spot. If you turn the camera off and on again it resets to Evaluative, so there is no need to change the setting back.

Set the mode to Aperture priority (Av) and try f4.5 as a first choice (that's the sharpest). Point the camera at the moon and zoom in to 12x. If you can't hold it steady, use a bigger aperture or a tripod.

Here is the same photo after some adjustment in Aperture:

I increased the exposure and the contrast a little, added some highlight control, changed the white balance, and added edge sharpening.

I just discovered that the ISO button on the Canon S3 allows me to change the brightness of movies while they are being shot. I appears to add a bias to the automatic exposure. The MF button is also a handy one for shooting movies: it locks the focus and prevents hunting in low light.

J. Vincent has a brief photo comparison of the S3 and the 5D: $420 vs. $5000. What does the extra money (and weight and size) get you in terms of images? Examine the images and decide yourself.

The Luminous Landscape has a review of the Canon S3 IS. They like it. That's good because Michael Reichmann who runs the site seriously knows what he is doing.

I discovered that it is possible to change the image stabilization mode from Shoot Only to Continuous and back again without going to the menu. You can do it quickly between shots. This might be useful in some circumstances, since while Shoot Only gives better results than Continuous, the viewfinder image is more jumpy.

Here is how to do it. Set the camera into Shoot Only IS mode by going to the menu and selecting it under IS Mode. Look through the viewfinder, zoom to 12x or more, and take a picture in Shoot Only mode -- but don't let the shutter button come all the way up. This will stop the camera from forgetting its current focus (you still have a green rectangle) and will also keep the IS turned on, running continuously. Now the viewfinder image is steady and you can take more pictures, either letting the button come all the way up to go back to Shoot Only mode, or letting it come part-way up to stay in Continuous mode.

Digital Camera Info has posted a review of the Canon S3 IS and there are some unusual and notable items in it. The review has some nuggets:

For the sharpest images, use a focal length of 16.8 mm (3x zoom) and an aperture of f4.5. The camera has the best dynamic range at ISO 100, not 80 as you might expect.

And some errors and odd comments:

Shot to shot is listed at 1.6 seconds in burst mode. It's actually 2.1 shots per second. The review claims that manual focus through the EVF is "nearly impossible", but I've done it and it is certainly usable. My hummingbird pictures were done that way. The complaints in the review that the power button takes "too much energy to turn" and that "it takes some serious effort to turn it toward the playback icon" make me wonder if the reviewer had a dud unit or if he/she didn't realize that you have to depress the tiny button on the control to unlock it. No mention at all of C mode. That's odd because it is a great feature. It remembers every setting, so when you turn the camera on you have a completely predictable set up. The conclusion includes "poor battery life", which is very surprising. I get easily 500 photos out of a set of 2300mAh batteries. The spec page lists the fStop min and max as 2.7 and 3.5. Surely 2.7 and 8.0?

How do you stop the Canon S3 from refocussing between shots? You can use manual focus, but that is a pain to set up. Auto Focus Lock doesn't help because it's not remembered between shots.

It's actually very easy, and works with Continuous shooting mode too: simply keep the shutter partially depressed instead of releasing it between shots. In other words, press all the way to take a bunch of shots, then ease off the shutter button until the camera stops shooting. The green focus rectangle is still there. Depress the shutter to take more shots at the same focus. Repeat as needed.

The Canon S3 IS has focus bracketing. But if you set it up it does not seem to work. There is a trick: focus bracketing only works in manual focus mode.

So to set it up, press FUNC and go down to Bracketing. Select Focus Bracketing and press SET. Select one of the possible ranges and press SET and FUNC to exit. If you take pictures, you will just get one flash of the card LED: one photo is being taken. But press MF (and adjust if necessary by holding MF and adjusting up and down) and then when you take the picture there will be three LED flashes and three bracketed photos.

I tried some experiments to see just how far the bracketing goes. The camera takes a normal-focus picture first, then a longer focus picture, then a shorter focus picture. In Super Macro mode I found that at setting 3 the two bracketed pictures were + and - about 4 mm for an object at 5 cm. At setting 2 it was about + and - 2 mm, and at setting 1 + and - 1 mm (all at f2.7 and 6 mm focal length).

It may be easier to just autofocus and use Continuous mode to shoot off several pictures while moving forward and backward slightly -- no messing with manual focus mode needed.

In case you didn't see it, Digital Photography Review has a review up today.

I've been looking at how the focussing on the Canon S3 IS works. The square in the center of the viewfinder shows the active area and the camera strictly evaluates everything inside that square. It uses horizontal contrast, looking for steep transitions as it adjusts focus.

Faced with a very horizontal subject, one way to help the focus system is simply to tip it slightly. This first picture (cropped and reduced) is of horizontal blinds. The camera could not focus on it, so I got one beep and a yellow square. It's a little out of focus, but hard to tell from this sample.

Once I angled the camera just a little, the focus worked: a double beep and a green square. I took this shot with the camera angled, but of course once focus is established and the shutter still held halfway, you can straighten it again.

In low light, focus is helped with a green assist light. It's quite a narrow beam of light and has its own lens on the front of the camera by the left strap hook. That it is green makes me suspect that the camera only uses the green photodiodes (the most populous of the three colors on the sensor) to make its focus decisions. I would have to experiment more to check that.

By covering the assist light and pointing the camera into a closet I could see how well it works. It is effective in very low light, but merely dim light, it does not help at all. The rule of thumb seems to be that if you can only see the bright center of the green beam, then it is not helping. In darker conditions you can see that the assist beam is actually wider and that broadness does seem to make a difference.

I also experimented with focus priority. If I get two verticals in the focus area, one close and one far away, either of which the camera is able to successfully what happens? It always picks the closest one. This makes taking pictures of bird in trees tricky because I will get a nice picture of a branch instead. The only way I could override what the camera was doing was to block out the offending close object with my finger held out in front of the lens.

While I am able to drive the focus square around the screen, it would be much more helpful if Canon would let me change the size of the focus area to make it smaller. Or provide a way of changing the focus bias to the distance.

At the request of a reader I did a quick test of vignetting at different apertures for two focal lengths. These photos are reduced in size and quality from full size images, but should have EXIF attached. Seventeen pictures of the clear blue sky. Get them as a 300k ZIP file here.

Here are my impressions having had the camera for five days and shooting about 750 photos with it.

It's fast. It does everything quickly. I reckon I can get a picture from cold in about three seconds. One second to lift the camera to my eye and flick it on. One second for the camera to start up, and one second to find the target, focus, and take the shot. I have it set up so that the C mode (custom) is what I leave it on all the time when it is turned off. In the Custom settings I have the focus at infinity, the zoom halfway, the shooting mode to continuous, IS on full time, the ISO set to 200, and the exposure set to -1/3 (Program mode). My goal is to have the best chance of catching whatever it is I want to shoot right there. Holding my finger on the shutter will take more than two shots per second. I currently have the metering set to evaluative, but I might change that to center-weighted.

The flip-out LCD is very handy, especially with the long lens popping out. I can hold the camera high or low or way out in front sideways. It's also good for putting the camera down on a table and viewing pictures.

It took a little while to get used to the button placement. I kept hitting the menu button by mistake. The hold I have ended up with is with my right pinkie curled up under the camera to support the weight, the next two fingers gripping it, and the index finger and thumb relatively free to operate the controls. For two hands, I can hold the camera with my left hand at the same time with my fingers over the top and my thumb under the bottom and jam my hand against my face to make a sun shield andd steady the camera more.

When it turns itself off because I have left it too long, it retracts the lens instead of just powering down with the lens sticking out.

I turned off the auto rotation of pictures and the rotation sensor. I find that software (iView Media Pro in my case) gets confused too much by this. So I rotate on the computer afterwards. It also rotates pictures in viewing mode. That is really weird. You turn the camera to look at something another way and the picture thwarts you.

Manual focus is quite usable if you have enough time for it. The trick is to focus using autofocus (shutter half-depressed) then click MF. Now focus is locked. Hold MF and up/down will change the focus. Yo get a magnified image in the screen to help. Get it about right, then hit SET and it will perfect your manual focus. It stays in MF mode across shots too. The manual is unclear on AFL -- auto focus lock. If you assign MF to the shortcut button then it doesn't do the same thing. It becomes an automatic focus lock. It locks autofocus for you without the inconvenience of holding the shutter halfway. But it forgets the setting between shots.

There has been a lot of discussion of ISO online. ISO 80 and ISO 100 are good. ISO 200 has some visible noise. ISO 400 has visible noise all over. ISO 800 is simply noisy.

I tried sports mode, but didn't like it. It keeps a high shutter speed (>1/300 I think) at the expense of ISO. It maintains a small aperture too, f8 normally, and there is no way to limit any off this. So you end up with ISO 800 f8 pictures. Motion is frozen and the picture is in focus, but it's very noisy. Focus appears to be locked so that 1m or 4m to infinity are in focus always. Continuous shooting (slow) mode is locked on. The way I would set this camera up for sports is ISO 400, shutter priority set to whatever I thought I could get away with, and hope that the aperture is OK.

Image stabilization works very well. I can take fully-zoomed pictures of the moon for example, hand-held. Here is a 100% crop:

And after some enhancement in Photoshop:

I can take hand-held photos down to 1/6s with IS on and have a 50% chance of a good picture. If I have something to lean on or rest the camera body I can get to about 1/2s.

Autofocus is fast and accurate. I find that it will focus accurately, but that you have to find something for it to accurately focus on. Focus on the side of a face and that will be in focus. But maybe not the eyes. My Olympus C750-UZ showed me what it had focussed on by moving the focus square, so I had some confirmation that it had done the right thing. But alas, not Canon. I will just have to get better at using the camera.

I have turned review off. So I take a shot and it does not appear in the viewfinder. If I take a shot and hold the shutter down (and the camera is not in continuous shooting mode) it will show a small version of the picture plus all the picture details. And importantly it flashes any area that is blown out. So you can sanity check very quickly. Zoom in on that and you can scan across the picture looking for focus detail. Touch the shutter to go back to shooting. In fact touching the shutter takes you back to shooting mode wherever you are.

Picture playback is fast. Zoom and pan at high speed. And you can zoom and then scroll through pictures without re-zooming. Very handy when you have just taken eight pictures of the same scene and want to compare one detail. You can skip photos by 9, 10, or 100.

Movies are very high quality and very memory-filling: something like 110MB a minute at 640x480, 30fps. Zooming works fine and is silent. Autofocus does its thing, sometimes with a little hunting. It's great for recording people telling you not to take a picture of them. Or for just shooting a movie when what you were going to take a picture of turns out to be more than photo material. And even when you are shooting a movie, you can still take pictures, albeit with a gap in the movie.

Manual modes (Tv, Av, and M) are usable, but not so good as my Olympus. The Olympus gave instant metering: adjust the aperture and see the shutter speed change. With the Canon I have to depress the shutter to see what the shutter speed will be. Seconds wasted. Also the Olympus would let me change the shutter speed and/or aperture by simply pressing up/down/left/right in any mode for a quick override.

I use the camera to take pictures of family, trips, animals and plants, vacation snaps, etc. It is a good fit for this. It is small enough that I can fit it into a pouch that clips to my belt, so there is no need to hold it all the time.

Battery life is very good. I got more than 500 pictures out of one set of 2500mA rechargeables.

Fringing is a problem. Here is a 35% scale crop of a Great Egret:

Now look at the head and the back at 100%:


and you see the colored fringes clearly. I haven't tried experimenting to see what minimizes the fringing yet, but I am sure it can be reduced. This is the price of having the 12x zoom in a small package. They all do this.

See other full-size examples in the gallery.