It's Guinness Time

It's Guinness Time, originally uploaded by Dan Baillie.

I wanted to produce a low-fi image that was reminiscent of a primitive analogue camera such as the Holga. I wanted to produce an image that conveyed all of the importance and atmosphere of the moment without the reliance on megapixels or pin sharp detail.

This was a candid shot that I took in the Bladnoch Inn, near Wigtown. I decided that I could use my small Canon Ixus to take this shot for several reasones, firstly it is relatively discreet, sencondly it has reasonable image stabilizing which helps and lastly due to the small sensor it is lower quality than from my Nikon DSLR's. I disabled the flash to make use of the available light. However this resulted in a slow shutter speed having to be used and despite the image stabilization a bit of motion blur. No problem, this helped add to the atmosphere.

The resulting image was then processed in photoshop and slight sepia tint was added in post production with some grain to make it look like a "real" photo :-)

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.