Whitesands at Sunset - Whitesands National Monument, NM
I'm working an experiment. The experiment is using a compact camera instead of my standard Nikon D3. I'm about to go on a very long trip to the Northeast using my motorbike. One thing I learned from my trip last year was I hardly ever used my very expensive and very large full-framed DSLR setup. This time I'm hoping to get by with a very simple point and shoot compact camera.
The camera I'm using is not so simple. And it's not so compact compared to others. It's the Canon G12 and among the P&S, it's gigantic. Still, will it measure up?
This title image was shot using this camera. It's a standard--for me--four image panoramic put together on my computer back at home. It looks pretty good. It's not perfect, far from it. But, it does a pretty decent job for such a little camera.
One of the biggest issues with this camera because of it's sensor size is noise. There's substantially more than there is with my D3 files in conditions like these. The other thing is the flexibility of the Canon camera isn't nearly as great as my D3. It is very difficult to shoot manual exposures and to adjust the focus manually and to do exposure bracketing. In fact, it's impossible to do as it seems--at least for all three modes. Anyway, I think I can work around it.
One thing for example is focus. Since it's such a small sensor, the depth of field is very large meaning I don't have to be so accurate on focus. That's helpful as I think to shoot this way I'll not be able to use the manual focus feature of this camera when shooting landscapes.
This is my first Canon camera. I've always heard about the beautiful files they produce. They sure are. The color, contrast, and sharpness is very good. I like it a lot. Over all I think the camera is a winner. I just have to get past the funky interface it has.
Motorcycle Whitesand - Whitesands National Monument, NM
You see, everything I am going to use on this big trip will have to fit on that bike. For my last trip to Utah, I used the top box on the rear of the bike as my storage location for my camera gear. It took the entire box. This time, the camera setup will hopefully be about 1/10th the size and therefore a lot less of an impact to my riding experience.
It's all about balance and I'm thinking I can achieve most of what I want to do photographically and have a much more enjoyable trip by going with something smaller like this camera. So far so good.
Cheers
Tom