The camera has a fixed lens with a 12X zoom ranging from 36 mm full frame equivalent to 432 mm full frame equivalent. The lens goes from f/2.7 to f/8 at the wide end to f/3.5 to f/8 at the telephoto end. f/2.7 on the S3is is equivalent to around full frame f/16 and f/8 is equivalent to around full frame f/45. The base ISO is 100 and the maximum ISO is 800.
The camera has a small LCD screen which is fully articulated which I used almost all the time in preference to the electronic viewfinder. I really liked the articulated screen because it let me use angles that would have been physically taxing or in some cases impossible using the viewfinder. I also found it less of a strain on my eyes using the screen. I have bought a number of cameras since then and as many as were practical, which is most of them, have articulated screens.
I also bought a Raynox 250 close-up lens and a tube which fits over the camera lens onto which the Raynox 250 could be screwed. With the Raynox 250 attached to the camera I could photograph scenes from 30mm wide down to around 11mm wide, with a working distance between the close-up lens and the subject of around 120mm.
Here is the S3is with Raynox 250 attached.
I used the S3is from around July 2007 to May 2009. I looked through all the images I kept, marking up ones that I thought looked ok and/or interesting as I went. I ended up with 192 images selected, which I have put in this album at Flickr.
The images were shot as JPEG. (I don’t think I then knew that it is possible to shoot raw with the S3is by using an open source utility, CHDK. I’m not sure I even knew what raw was.) After some experimentation I adjusted the JPEG settings by turning the Contrast and Sharpness down two steps (out of two) and Saturation down by one step, leaving the Red and Blue neutral but bringing the Green down by one step to get the colours more to my liking. The reason for turning down Contrast and Sharpness was to maximise my flexibility in post processing by minimising the “baked in” effects of the in-camera JPEG engine that could be difficult or impossible to reverse, an approach sometimes known as “pseudo raw”. I always used post processing rather than using the out of the camera JPEGs.
The images are shown as I post processed them at the time. Some of them are quite small, only 800 pixels on the longest side. This is because that was the maximum size allowed for images in a forum that I was posting in. The others were full size. I suppose I must have posted them on a different forum, or not on any forum. I have posted a few of these S3is images in the following posts. For those that were full size I exported them from Lightroom 1000 pixels high because small sensor images don’t look very good if you look too closely, and given that some of them were cropped from being only 2100 pixels high to start with I thought that 1000 pixels high was hopefully big enough to get a decent look at them without being put off by the underlying lack of detail, noise or other infelicities. For the ones that were less than 1000 pixels high I used Topaz AI Gigapixel to upsize them to 1000 pixels high.
No comments:
Post a Comment