Back in October I bought a new Canon S3 IS camera which I'm putting to use in providing the majority of the shots on this very page. This new high-tech beast was my update on a Canon A20 which was effectively a point & shoot camera & my first venture into digital photos. It has taken & still takes some great shots, but it has had a pixel die which shows up as a red spot in every photo & with new cameras falling in price every day, I had to take the plunge. I suspect the little A20 will survive forever & whilst it has been superseded, it remains in my car's glove-box for emergency purposes.

I updated for the purposes of getting creative & the S3 IS became the best choice. It is image stabilised, has a 12x optical zoom, swivel screen & was around $300 less than I paid for the A20 at the turn of the century.

Now, I'm snapping away at everything & thought I'd present a couple of those shots which everyone has to try at some point which makes them feel like they're breaking some creative ground. So, I'm doing the same thing & whilst you can find similar images all over the web, I'm taking the effort of you having to search for them!

Firstly, the good old dripping tap. Catching a drip & getting it in focus isn't terribly hard, but getting the timing right to actually catch the drip as it falls between the tap & the sink is frustrating. High speed shots help the issue & then it's just a case of filtering through the shots with no drips! Thankfully, I found one in the mix!



Light globes just tend to work out perfectly every time. I've taken stacks of photos of various lights & I don't have any which aren't crisply in focus. I'm putting it down to luck! This one was taking without actually looking through a viewfinder, but just pointing the camera in hopefully the correct direction & pressing the shutter. Simple & effective.



This little guy is a little pewter Squee from the third installment of Myst. He became my photographic study one night & of all the photos I took, the images which were most intriguing were those in which the light completely blew out & overexposed the subject.



The Canon is a great camera & it's effectively one step down from an SLR, but the gap between the two is still quite significant. I'm finding the compression of the jpeg format causes the images to be slightly soft which is a minor annoyance but since I'm not taking shots for the front page of a daily newspaper, it's not really a concern. The price is what makes the Canon S3 IS a winner. At half the price of an SLR, with 12x zoom & no extra lenses to carry, it's pretty good value.