First pictures with my new camera

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts I decided to buy a new compact camera.  I wouldn’t have done this if I hadn’t already got a home for my Ixus 60 – after all we’ve taken a lot of photos together.  So, I now have a Powershot S90.  I decided to stick with Canon for two reasons, the main one is that I think their compact cameras take excellent macro shots which, as you have probably realised is very important to me.  Staying with the same manufacturer also meant that there were fewer new features and controls to worry about – the buttons look the same.

Today I took a trip to Ryton Organic Gardens to test drive my new camera, and, predictably, it was the macro function that got the workout (there isn’t much in the way of landscape to photograph at this time of year at Ryton).  To make things even better the anenome blanda were flowering (one of my favourite spring flowers) and they were being visited by bees – another favourite photography topic of mine.

The S90 has a lot of features that make it a great point and shoot, but which I will possibly never use.  I set the camera onto macro function in the program mode and kept the ISO at 200.  The camera chose a focal length of 6mm, a shutter speed of 1/400secs (I don’t think the ixus would have been that fast) and f/4.0.

I think this picture is pretty good, I like the colours as they come out of the camera, and it seems pretty sharp.  The only thing that was misbehaving was the bee!

When I put it in Lightroom and zoomed in I was still pretty happy with the result – you can judge for yourself – the shot below is pretty much a 1:1 crop.

So, first impressions – when it comes to macros it produces the excellent images I have come to expect from Canon (although I have had a little bit of wandering focus that I will have to master).