My new toy came today: a Canon S110 camera. Per Thom’s suggestion, I decided to get a slightly more “serious” camera for my photography work. I always feel a little self-conscious when Thom and I are backpacking somewhere and he pulls out his massive Canon MegaShot SuperCam 2000X or whatever, and I whip out my little silver Canon ELPH point-and-shoot. Although I really like that camera and it’s certainly easy to use, it has a fairly limited feature set.
I chose the S110 for three reasons, really:
1) It’s compact– basically the same size as my old Canon, so it’s not ten pounds of high-tech magic to lug around.
2) It’s cheap– only $200 on eBay, compared with at least $400-600 for a serious DSLR sort of camera.
3) It shoots in RAW mode– Thom and others say that’s the only “true” way to take pictures because it allows for a great deal of post-processing.
After charging the battery, I took a few exploratory pictures. The quality is noticeably better than my old camera (as it should be, I suppose). Here’s an example of a quick point-and-shoot of Laralee’s Valentine’s rose:
Wow!
I completely understand that buying a fancier camera doesn’t mean I’m going to suddenly transform into a fantastic photographer. But it’s my hope that with some better tools at my disposal, I’ll at least be able to take my work up a notch.