Deric Horn gave a very informative one-hour talk at Cocoaheads at Apple in Cupertino this week covering the developer improvements in Cocoa for Leopard. There are so many improvements under the hood that it is hard to remember all of them and Deric's talk served to fill in those blanks. Attendance was very good, and there were plenty of new faces. If you live anywhere nearby it is worth a visit. We meet in Town Hall, building 4. That's the auditorium where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac, iWork, iLife, and .Mac in August.

I recorded the audio on my Canon S3 and edited it in GarageBand. You can download the file (AAC stereo, 30MB) via the Silicon Valley Cocoaheads page.

Tags: Leopard, Programming, Cocoa, CocoaHeads, News, Canon, S3

Birthday Cake: 1/800s f/1.8 ISO800 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, cropped, unadjusted

It appears that the retro photo equipment fetish is in full swing. Fraser Speirs is posting about his experiences with the 50mm f1.8, and commenting about John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, James Duncan Davidson, and Bill Bumgarner.

I have this very inexpensive lens on my Canon 30D (1.6 crop factor), it's really an 80mm lens to me.

How do I find it? It's very light, almost non-existent compared to the other monsters I have. I use it when I need to take pictures in little light and have the freedom to move around, like in the birthday cake example above. The only light is from the candles, and I exposed that at 1/800s. I used a high ISO to get a high shutter speed because I wanted to make sure that the blowing out would not be a blur. I was taking pictures before and after in room light and ISO 800 was good for that too.

I can get my 52mm polarizing filter on this lens that I have tried to use on my Canon S3 (it's very hard to use a polarizer on a camera with an electronic viewfinder since I can't really see the effect). I find that darkening the glare with a polarizer does more than that: it increases the the ambient light by compensating with a slower shutter speed. Compare the image below (no polarizer):

Table No Polarizer: 1/50s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

With this one with the polarizer fitted and turned to remove the glare:

Table With Polarizer: 1/15s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

The table looks entirely different since the shutter is now three times slower.

The depth of field control is something I am still learning. It's much more pronounced on large images because the difference between sharp and fuzzy is more easy to see. Here is a photo taken in a restaurant, focussing on the table by the window:

Noodle House: 1/1600s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

One catch with the 50mm f/1.8 is that it has no image stabilization like my other lenses. That means I have to take faster exposures than I would normally and/or hold the camera extra steady. This photo was taken in a dim corridor and I was able to get an image without any shake at 1/160s:

Fall Leaves: 1/160s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

I can easily see the difference in sharpness between pictures taken at f/1.8 and other apertures, so if I'm thinking about it, I stop it down for the best image. But I'm usually not thinking in terms of sharpness when I take pictures: I'm concerned more with depth of field or removing movement blur. My other lenses are much more costly and very sharp, so I don't marvel at the sharpness of this lens, though I know some people do. There is plenty to learn.

Tags: Canon, Lenses, Photography, Fetishes, Polarizer, 30D, S3

Bird Over The Bay:1/800s f/9.0 ISO100 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, cropped, adjusted

One of the things I'm loving about my DSLR is that I no longer have to deal with the fog of an electronic viewfinder. They should really be called electronic fuzz makers: it's very difficult to know what you are taking a picture of. I've had many a surprise when I've looked at the result in Aperture and seen objects and detail that I had no idea existed at the time.

Now I can track things, see accurate color, be aware of detail, and, most importantly, know when things are in focus. And it makes manual focussing possible. Manual focussing with up and down buttons and an electronic viewfinder is just wretched. In the picture above I could wait until the bird banked in front of the lighter water so that it was recognizable and get the picture I wanted with ease.

Of course with the 30D I don't get a live preview, nor a flip-out screen (like the S3), so that makes it harder to get certain shots. Live preview is one advantage the 40D has over the 30D that would be useful to me.

Tags: DSLR, Viewfinder, Canon, 30D, 40D, S3

Teapot: 1/100s f/11.0 ISO100 48mm, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55 IS, unadjusted

Now I have shot about 1800 photos with my 30D, I'm starting to learn what settings make sense for the kind of things I do.

I have a custom picture style set up that has Sharpness +2, Contrast 0, Saturation +2, Color tone 0. This leaves me less work to do in Aperture: just a little sharpening is needed and sometimes more saturation. That's one of three. I have another with less Sharpness and another with more Sharpness and more Saturation.

White balance is best either left on auto, or quite often on Shade. Out of the shade that setting gives a nice orangey effect that is good for indoors.

Fill-in flash makes a big difference when it comes to getting rid of harsh dark areas or when extra sharpness is needed and the light is low. The camera is clever enough that if the shutter speed is faster than 1/250 (the fastest sync speed), it will cap the shutter at 1/250 and increase the f number to compensate. That way you get a picture with a deeper DOF than intended rather than no picture at all. Flash recharge takes about 1/4 second, so I can take the next shot almost right away.

Evaluative metering is very good and gets it right almost all of the time, so I leave it on that.

For autofocus I either use One shot mode or AI Servo, the latter for moving objects that I want in a particular part of the frame. I have changed the function of the 8-way control so that I can use that to select the focus point quickly.

Drive stays on 3 per second normally, and ISO at 400, going up or down by a factor of 2 or 4 when needed. I'd prefer just ISO 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 settings, but no: I have to click past all the intermediate ones.

Typically the ON/OFF button stays at ON. I set it to / when I need to be able to change the exposure compensation quickly. Otherwise I avoid that setting because it is easy to change the exposure setting unintentionally.

I normally limit the aperture to f11 or larger to avoid diffraction effects. Slowly I'm getting to learn the depth of field that is available at different focal lengths and f-stops. It didn't matter anywhere near as much with my S3 because the images were not as sharp. Now I have to be very careful of depth of field.

I'm also learning that the EF-S 17-55 IS lens I use a lot of the time has its limits. Close focus at 55mm is not so sharp, while at 17mm it is. So I back off the distance or the zoom when I find myself going there. It is very versatile and stays on the camera most of the time.

Tags: Canon, 30D, S3

DPReview now has a full review of the Canon S5, the successor to the S3 that I have. I've played with the S5 in a store, and I'm not impressed, especially since the S3 costs half what the S5 does right now. The big turn-offs for me are the card access (in with the batteries), and the slower burst speed. There are plenty of comments going up right now in the Canon forum.

Tags: Canon, S3, S5, Review

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Fireworks

Canon has announced the Powershot S5 IS and dpreview has the details. It uses the DIGIC III processor, has a hot shoe, and a bigger flip screen. Now 8 megapixels in the sensor.

I have the Canon S3 IS and am planning to replace it next spring. Do I get an S5 or go for an DSLR?

Tags: Canon, S3, S5, Photography, DSLR, Interesting Stuff

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Flash

Last night at about 8pm I thought I heard fire crackers outside. So I peered out of the window, and saw what looked like fireworks going up into the sky. When I went outside to investigate and looked over the neighbor's fence I saw flames coming out of the upstairs bedroom of a house two doors down at the back. After calling 911 I went back out, saw that the fire department was there and started talking pictures with my Canon S3. I added 18 pictures to the Canon S3 gallery (click forward to the fourth page). As far as I know the house was empty at the time.

Tags: Fire, Canon, S3, Interesting Stuff

I visited Macworld 2007 today. It was very busy all day. I took these pictures with my Canon S3 set to ISO 200 since the light was pretty low.

Many people sat to watch demonstrations of the features of Leopard, the iPhone, Apple TV, and others:

Here are some new Mail features:

Apple TV was on display:

Apple TV is much like Front Row but outputs to your TV instead of the computer screen. It can be synced like an iPod. So another way of thinking of it is as a high definition video iPod with wireless streaming added. The unit has a fat rubber base that does not slip and cannot scratch anything. It gets quite warm during use.

Aperture training was popular:

There were about thirty 24" iMacs set up for the attendees to play with and follow the demo. This is the same model that I use for Aperture. Lightroom was also popular.

The iPhone was displayed like the Hope diamond, with security and plexiglass:


Getting close up pictures was tricky, but possible:



It is smaller than you think it should be and very rounded:

The screen is extremely sharp and crisp. I could read the smallest text. At 160 pixels per inch it is about twice the linear resolution of a regular computer display.

Tags: Macworld, Photography, Canon, S3, Apple TV, iPhone, Aperture, Apple

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.

Tags: Photography, Moon, Canon, S3, Aperture

I just discovered that the ISO button on the Canon S3 allows me to change the brightness of movies while they are being shot. It 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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Movies, Tips And Tricks

Having written an article on editing Canon S3 video with Final Cut Express, I thought I would see what iMovie can do with the footage. I don't need FCE for many quick movies, so iMovie is the weapon of choice.

I create an iMovie project and select DV Widescreen since I want a wide screen aspect ratio:

The raw footage from the S3 is 640x480 so it will not fit the aspect ratio of widescreen 640x360 and the result is black bars on each side:

I have to chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image before importing into iMovie. To do this I open it in Quicktime and export it using Apple Intermediate Codec (you probably need the Pro version to do this). The video settings are like this:

And the size settings are set to Custom with the width and height set so:

I elect to crop the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio of the source. The resulting movie is about 75% of the size of the on I started with -- about right considering that 1/4 of the area has been removed. This step is also a good opportunity to shorten the length of the clip by not exporting any footage at the beginning and end that will not be used.

Now importing the clip makes it fit the frame:

And it is ready for editing.

Tags: Canon, S3, Widescreen, Movies, iMovie

I recently added ten more images to the Canon S3 IS gallery, bringing the total to 126. These are all unmodified, full size, and with EXIF.

If you are new to the S3 or are considering buying one, these should help you see what can be done with the camera alone.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery, Photography

I now have a wide angle lens for my Canon S3, a Raynox DCR-6600PRO. This lens multiplies the focal length by 0.66 without affecting the aperture, allowing the 36 mm equivalent wide end of the S3 to become 24 mm. It has a 52 mm mount and screws into the Lensmate barrel that I already have. This is what it looks like attached to the camera:



In this photo, the start of the Raynox is indicated by the white writing. Also shown is the 72 mm lens cap. I have also posted a Wide Angle gallery which contains photos taken with this lens and some comparison photos of the same scene taken without it.

The lens advertises a usable zoom range with digital cameras of 3x. I was able to get it to focus at zooms out to 8x, but not beyond. At about 6x the quality of the image deteriorates, especially at the corners. It is handy to be able to use some of the zoom range because I can get less wide shots without removing the lens. I can see distortion with this lens, especially if I am close to something with straight lines. And I have to be very careful of lens flare. It flares easily and with an ugly line of circles. It is perfectly usable with the macro and super macro settings.

It is particularly good for chasing kids and pets around and shooting movies. The image quality does not matter so much for movies and the added field of view and exaggerated depth of movement allow me to capture their antics very easily. Indoors it is very useful as well. Even in a confined space I can get far enough back to capture what I want to record. One thing I cannot do is use the flash. A chunk of the image is completely black, caused by the shadow of the front of the lens.

I like it because I can now take pictures like this one that include the close foreground and the horizon:



And I can get some unusual perspectives:



It is great for putting close to the ground and angling up. The pop-out viewfinder of the S3 is essential for this kind of use. And the bayonet mounting to the camera body means that I can pop it on and off quickly. If I am out with this lens I wear a fanny pack so I can put it away quickly and find myself quickly attaching, snapping, and detaching the lens as I walk about.

See example photos with originals and EXIF in the Wide Angle gallery.

Tags: Photography, Canon, S3, Wide Angle

The Canon S3 can take photos (but not movies -- drat!) in widescreen 16:9 format and I have increasingly been shooting this way. To change to widescreen, press FUNC and then scroll down to the image size icon at the bottom. Select W, and exit by pressing FUNC again. Now the camera will chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image and deliver a smaller file.

The look of the image is very different from the normal 4:3 format, certainly for viewing on a computer. This first image is a regular photo viewed in Aperture at full screen:

The black bars at each side are filled in because the ratios do not match. The same photo taken in wide screen mode displays like this:

There are still bars, but the narrower horizontal bars are much less obtrusive, the uninteresting sky and road parts of the image are no longer present, and the image fills a wider field of my eyes' view. Altogether a nicer picture, achieved just by throwing information away.

Tags: Canon, S3, Widescreen

The Canon S3 IS shoots movies at 640x480 resolution, 30fps, so it is a contender for double duty as a video camera. My only problem up until now has been editing. But recently I figured out how to do it and get a HD 16:9 aspect ratio movie into iDVD.

I use Final Cut Express HD 3.0, but FCE has restrictions on the formats it will edit and I cannot just dial in the camera resolution. I normally shoot using anamorphic on a standard definition video camera, so the resolution of the frames is 720x480 but with a scale factor applied to stretch the horizontal. I looked briefly at converting my S3 footage to DV and dealing with all the anamorphic confusion, but that seemed like a lot of work. And anyway I really wanted to avoid DV and use HD if at all possible.

Here is how I did it.

Create a New Final Cut Express Project

Set the project up to be HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30 by pressing control-Q and selecting from the pop-up:

This gives a resolution of 1280x720 progressive (no interlacing). It is double the width of the S3 video, and less than double the height, so forcing the S3 video into this format will chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of each frame:

In S3 video coordinates it will look like this:

There is only enough information for 640x360, so that will make for a good Quicktime export size.

Import S3 Video

I do this simply by dragging and dropping the video into the browser, but File > Import > Fiiles (command I) will work too. The raw AVI files are recognized with no problem. Internally they are motion JPEG -- just a sequence of JPEG-compressed images.

Create a new HD Sequence

I control-click in the browser and create a new sequence. This is an important step, because the sequence that was there already (Sequence1 normally) is in the previous format, the format that was set before I changed to 720p:

See that Anamorphic flag by Sequence1? My previous project was anamorphic HD. Right-click on a sequence and select Item Properties to check how it is set up. So I delete Sequence1, rename Sequence2 to Blog, and double click it to create a timeline window for it.

Double The Size of the Clips

Naively inserting the clips into this new sequence gives a display like the one below. The viewer (100%) on the left shows the original clip, while the timeline (66%) on the right shows a small image against black:

That's because on the right the 640x480 image is centered on a 1280x720 frame. So I must double its size. I will do this before adding it to the sequence. So I remove the clip from the sequence and double click on the clip in the browser, click on the Motion tab top left, and change the scale to 200 by typing in the box.

Now clicking on the video tab and reinserting my clip in the sequence gives me this:

Now I am filling the HD frame and automatically cropping. The advantage of scaling the original clip as I decided to do is that I never have to do it again, however many times I use that clip. The disadvantage is that I can no longer see the whole original frame in the viewer (see on the left). The alternative is to scale the clips after they are inserted into the sequence.

The red line above the timeline tells me that I need to render that part of the sequence. That is a consequence of using an HD format: all media is converted to the Apple Intermediate format. Once rendered I can play it full speed.

Make A Movie

Now all I need to do is to edit my movie as I normally would. In addition, because I have extra material above and below the final frame I can use the motion key framing to move the frame up and down if I need to adjust what is displayed in the available space.

To export to iDVD, nothing special is needed. Just use File > Export > Quicktime Movie and that will create a file that iDVD can import. It is quick too if you deselect Make Self-Contained Movie because it can just reference the Apple Intermediate movie. If I open that with Quicktime I see that it is 1280x720 as expected. Also it is much bigger than what I started with, since the material was scaled up by a factor of 2 and results in about 4 times the file size. This is the one disadvantage with this method. iDVD will squish the frames down to standard widescreen automatically and recognize it as 16:9.

To export to Quicktime, again nothing special is needed. 640x360 or smaller is the recommended size for the aspect ratio.

Alternative Methods

I don't have Final Cut Pro, but I would expect it to handle this in a more standard fashion. And since I have not upgraded to Final Cut Express 3.5 I cannot say how this would work in that. Once I get and Intel CPU I will upgrade and my workflow may change.

Tags: Canon, S3, Movies, Final Cut, Quicktime

I added fourteen more recent photos to the Canon S3 IS gallery. The thumbnails are also a little bigger and have been split into six pages with twenty images each.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery

Here is a song about a banana slug that I recorded on my Canon S3 IS using the sound recording function. It was recorded at a campfire after the light was too low to get any images. It's a very handy function of this camera.

MP3 192kb (3MB)    AAC 128kb (2MB)

The camera put the sound file into a SNDR folder on the card. I imported the raw WAV file from that into GarageBand so I could trim the ends and add some compressor and export to iTunes for format conversion for publishing. The raw file had no clipping, so the camera must have adjusted the level very well.

To get to the sound recording function, switch the camera into playback mode (as though you are going to look at photos), then hit MENU, scroll down to Sound Recorder and press SET. From there you can record and play back. A 1G card will hold about an hour and a half of stereo at 44.1kHz.

The fastest way to record sound is with the Movie button. Just press it. When you download the movie, extract the audio track using Quicktime or some other software. Not as convenient after the fact and more memory-intensive than the sound recorder. But I do this when I'm not ready for whatever it is that is happening.

The third way to record sound is attach memos to photos. If you take a photo but keep the shutter held down, the image appears in the viewer. While holding the shutter down, press the Flash/Sound button on the top, to the left of the pop-up flash, and a sound recorder will appear for a one-minute annotation. You can do the same thing in playback mode. I've not used that feature, partly because Aperture doesn't handle the sound files.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

Banana Slug
Lyrics by Marty Schafer and Friends at SMOE

You know I love my baby
I like the way she hugs
People don't understand
She's a banana slug

BA-NA-NA-SLUGGGG

She's got just one foot
And she aint got no toes
She just hangs out in the forest
And helps it decompose

BA-NA-NA-SLUGGGG

Now some folks say that she's gross
But I won't hear that jive
If it weren't for my baby
The forest might not survive

BA-NA-NA-SLUGGGG

The way you shake your antenna
You know you give me such bliss
C'mon c'mon c'mon banana slug
Won't you give me a kiss

BA-NA-NA-SLUGGGG

Oh when you slide through the forest
You know you look so fine
C'mon c'mon c'mon banana slug
Let me lick on that slime

BA-NA-NA-SLUGGGG

Banana nana nana slug
Banana nana nana slug
Banana nana nana slug

Tags: Canon, S3, Sound, Slugs

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, 5D, Photography

I posted some more photos in the Canon S3 IS photo gallery today, bringing the total to 100 images. All the unmodified originals are provided so you can read the EXIF, peek at the pixels and make your own adjustments. Note that many of the images are taken with the sharpness on the S3 lower than normal.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Review

That's the bag I keep my Canon S3 IS in. It's 7 inches (18 cm) high, 4.5 inches (11.5) wide, and 4 inches (10 cm) deep with the camera inside. Also inside is a pack of four batteries (flat across the bottom) and in the pocket are spare cards. The camera goes in with the grip at the top and the lens pointing away from me. That's it. There is nothing else to carry. That set up is good for more than 1100 pictures. I could fit a second pack of batteries in there too if I tried.

The two zippers go all the way to the bottom and there are pieces of fabric that prevent it from opening too far. So access is really easy. It has a velcro strap that hangs it on my belt (I never use the shoulder strap). It's a TRAX TCP 03 and cost about $10 at Best Buy.

Tags: Canon, S3, Tips And Tricks

I shot a movie of an ant stuck on a sticky plant with my Canon S3 IS today (10MB 30fps H.264 Quicktime, 45s). Click to play in a new window:

To get the magnification I used an old 50 mm SLR lens mounted backwards. I used Quicktime to reduce the size and recode from AVI to H.264.

The plant that it is on has blue flowers and sticky parts that break off easily:
   
What type of plant is this? [Update: A reader tells me it is Cape Plumbago (Plumbago capensis)]

Tags: Movies, Ant, Macro, Canon, S3

The Canon S3 IS has the ability to select one of five sharpening settings, and I have been experimenting to figure out which one to use. The real question I have is which setting gives the best results after post processing, and is post-processing worth the trouble?

So I shot some test pictures. Here are reduced versions of the images:
   
   
All the original and adjusted images are posted to the Sharpness gallery. They are taken at ISO 100, f4.5. Those marked "low sharp" are with the camera set at its lowest sharpening setting, those marked "med sharp" are with the setting in the middle, and those marked "high sharp" are at the maximum. The suffixes: "50" = 50% at one pixel; "100" = 100% at 1 pixel; "100 2" = 100% at 2 pixels.

To change the sharpness settings on the Canon S3 you go into the Function menu, then scroll down to My Colors. One click left gets to the Custom settings and you can hit Set to make changes. Scroll up and down to Sharpness and select the amount.

The first thing I see is that the high setting is too sharp. There are halos everywhere. See these 100% clips:
         
Now compare that last one with the low sharpening fence picture:

and with the medium sharpening one:

The medium one is not bad at all, and the low sharpening one is too soft. How much can I improve the images, and is it worth it?

Using Aperture's default sharpening setting of 50% 1 pixel, I sharpened the low and medium sharp fence pictures. Then I changed the setting to 100% and sharpened the low sharp fence picture, and finally tried a radius of two pixels:

First medium at 50%, 1 pixel:

Then low at 50%, 1 pixel:

Low at 100%, 1 pixel:

And finally low 100% at 2 pixels:

Scaled to screen size, I prefer the second to last one. It has slightly more noise than the second one, but the sharpness looks good.

One thing I discovered is that the size of the final image affects the effect of the radius of the sharpening filter. Viewed at about 25% full size, the low sharpness fence and trike pictures look best with 100% at 2 pixels.

One side effect of the sharpening in Aperture at 2 pixels is that it creates more noise than the high setting of the camera and results in a lot of 100% black pixels, something that the camera does not do. The result is that the Aperture-sharpened images have a better contrast than the camera-sharpened images at the expense of noise.

Boosting medium sharp images to 100% 2 pixels resulted in oversharpening. Playing with the images at likely viewing resolutions I ended up preferring the low sharpness setting of the camera and using 100% intensity at between 1 and 2 pixels. So I think that it is worth using the lowest sharpening setting of the camera and the post processing. Aperture makes it easy and to generate new versions and fast to apply sharpening, even on my imac G5.

See all the images in the sharpness gallery.

Tags: Canon, S3, Sharpness

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Image Stabilization, Tips And Tricks

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.

I have added fourteen fireworks pictures (full size) to the canon S3 gallery.

Tags: Canon, S3, Fireworks

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?

Tags: Canon, S3, Review

A half-reasonable picture of a jumping spider about 1/8 inch long I found today in the grass. I took this with my Canon S3 in natural light with a reversed 50mm SLR lens fitted. It's been cropped and enhanced in Aperture.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro, Spider

Several hundred photos later with some decent light and I have some more content for the macro gallery. Not many good ones, but I'm getting better at it.

That's the head of a fly that landed nearby at about 50%. The depth of field is the biggest challenge. If the light is good then the movement blur is not a problem. I'm doing all of this hand-held, resting the SLR lens on my hand or something if I can. The magnification is very good: by using water droplets on leaves you can see individual plant cells.

I also split the gallery into three and created a new main page for the gallery.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro

Now I have the male-male 49 mm ring, I have completed my macro set up. The camera on the right is connected to the 52 mm Lensmate adaptor tube. The smooth ring and the ribbed ring adapt that down to 49 mm male, and the SLR lens on the left screws into that.

Another picture of the same set up:

That's a 50 mm f1.8 lens on the end, an old Olympus kit lens. So how did it perform? I got one good picture in the fading light of the evening (click for full-sized image):

The circle is what you see with the S3 zoomed out. I had the focus on manual, set to infinity. Focusing consists of moving the camera closer or away from the subject. In theory I can zoom in on the above 12x using the camera zoom, but reality is more harsh. As you would expect, the main difficulty is light and depth of field. Most of my shots came out like this, especially when zoomed:

That's a leg. Here is a picture of my monitor screen, hand held:

My next challenge is fixing up a flash diffuser to see how much I can get out of the built-in flash. I plan on making some sort of light pipe with a diffuser on the end, but we'll see what comes out of the design process.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro, Lenses

I received a black 52 mm adaptor for the Canon S3 today from Lensmate. I also included a 52 to 49 mm step-down ring. When my male-male adaptor arrives I will be able to connect the S3 to an old reversed 50mm SLR lens and try it out as a macro photography tool.

Tags: Canon, S3

I took a couple of old SLR (Tamron) lenses with focal lengths of 50 mm and 28 mm and tried them out as macro lenses today. You take the SLR lens and put it in front of the camera lens backwards. The focus is about and inch and a half to two inches in front of the whole assembly. And the great thing is that you can use the S3 zoom to make the image bigger.

This is what the Supermacro mode can do (full frame, reduced to 21%):



The "e" is about 137 pixels high on the original. With a 50mm lens in front I get an "e" of about 740 pixels; about 5.4 times more magnification:



And with a 28mm lens, the "a" is about 1300 pixels, a magnification factor of about 9.5 times that of the Supermacro mode:



The way I got these big images was by zooming the lens on the S3 all the way in. The depth of field is very shallow of course. The light level was very low, so the images are of very low quality (and have been enhanced a little), but this was just a magnification test.

I have ordered a reversing ring and an adaptor so I can properly fit the SLR lenses to the camera. Once I have those I will do some outside experiments in better light.

Tags: Canon, S3, Macro

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.

Tags: Canon, S3, Focus, Tips And Tricks

I have added more photos taken with the Canon S3 IS to the gallery. There are now 60 full-size images available for viewing and download.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery