Canon P&S Happiness

Natural History Museum, originally uploaded by Dan Baillie.

I have been incredibly busy over the last month, both on a personal basis and also a photographic one. So I apologise for the lack of new posts on the blog. However I intend to make up for all that right now.

Following on from my last post regarding my small pocketable Canon Ixus Camera. I was mooching around on the internet wondering whether I should add a more sophsticated compact camera to my collection when I stumbled across a site called CHDK for Dummies. CHDK stands for Canon Hack Development Kit, ok it's not very snappily named but if you have a small Canon compact camera then it is a revelation.

The CHDK allows you to copy a small program onto the media card in your Canon compact, through this program you can then unlock a whole host of advanced features such as being able to shoot in RAW, shutter priority, aperture priority, time lapse photography and also motion detection.

CDHK seems to be perfectly safe and does not damage the camera, you can choose to let it autoload every time you start the camera or fire it up at will. I have been using it for the last few weeks and can testify that it is incredibly powerful, absolutely free and a must have. It's saved me from buying a more expensive compact with more manual control. My inexpensive Ixus now does it all.