In May 2009, after almost two years of using the S3is, I bought a Canon SX10. This was the next but one model in the same series as the S3is. I used it for a little over two years, until the summer of 2011.
(I considered getting a Panasonic FZ50. I had come across Mark Berkerey's work by then and he used an FZ50. An advantage it had from my perspective was that it went to f/11 rather than f/8. This meant that even though its sensor was slightly larger than the sensor in the SX10 it would give greater depth of field than I would be able to get with f/8 on the SX10. Many people won't use minimum aperture because of the loss of fine detail from diffraction, but Mark used f/11 on the FZ50 and got widely acclaimed excellent results, and I would have been happy to have f/11 available. However, I was using a tripod pretty much all the time at that stage and I used the LCD rather than the viewfinder. Unfortunately the FZ50 LCD was hinged at the bottom rather than the side and this made it unsuitable for use with a tripod.)
The SX10 is a bridge camera with a 1/2.3" sensor, around 6mm x 4.5mm in size. The sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio and 10 megapixels, 3648 x 2736 as compared to 6 megapixels for the S3is.
The camera has a fixed lens with a 20X zoom (compared to 12X for the S3is) ranging from 28 mm full frame equivalent to 560 mm full frame equivalent. The lens goes from f/2.8 to f/8 at the wide end to f/5.7 to f/8 at the telephoto end. f/2.8 on the SX10 is equivalent to around full frame f/16 and f/8 on the SX10 is equivalent to around full frame f/45. The base ISO is 80 and the maximum ISO is 1600. Like the S3is, the SX10 has a fully articulated LCD screen, but a bit larger and higher resolution.
Like the S3is, the SX10 did not shoot raw. At some point in this period I found out about CHDK and tried using it. It worked, producing DNG files, but I found it difficult to handle the DNG files and quickly gave up on raw and continued shooting JPEG with noise reduction and sharpness turned down to give a bit of extra flexibility in post processing and contrast turned down to give a little more dynamic range.
Overall then the SX10 was similar to the S3is, with various incremental upgrades. The thing that made a big difference for me was that the SX10 had a hot shoe, which opened up the option of using an external flash. What seems odd to me now is that I waited almost a year before getting an external flash. I have an album from April 2010 titled "Trying flash for macros - again". I don't know if the "again" refers to my failed attempts to use flash with the S3is, using a polystyrene plate as a diffuser or something similar with the SX10 that had not worked. Whichever it was, this time was evidently different. I must have been using the on-camera flash for that session, but the next month I bought a Canon 430exii external flash. There followed a period of six or seven years during which I experimented from time to time with different flash setups, as is common with people who do close-up/macro.
My experiments at that time included diffusers and reflectors. Here are a couple of diffusers I made to fit on to the 430exii. They were modelled on the Lord V (Brian Valentine) Coke tin diffuser. They used paper kitchen towel as the diffusion material, with one layer on the outside and another one inside.
Another approach I tried was bouncing the light off of a card that I could bend to direct and concentrate the light. The card was attached to the tripod using a Wimberley Plamp (an earlier and less sophisticated version than the one in the link). The tripod used heavy metal tubing and had a reversible central column with an articulated arm. I had a focus rail mounted on a ball head on the end of the arm. The reflector arrangement was not successful. (You may wonder why I was wearing a hat indoors. I was playing the part of the photographer and the hat was an essential part of my photographic kit. I could use it to cover up the camera while I took it back indoors when it started raining, which was not an unusual occurrence.)
After that bout of experimentation was over I ended up using a diffuser on the 430exii with the flash mounted on the hot shoe, which I could use in landscape or portrait mode, although the illumination could look a bit strange coming in from the side and I mostly worked in landscape mode, with portrait orientation images being portrait crops from landscape originals.
For my first year with the SX10 I was working with available light. In the second year I used flash, on and off. Sometimes I used available light for invertebrates and sometimes flash, sometimes switching around during a session. It isn't a reliable sample, but I'm interested to see that of the 10 invertebrate images in the SX10 - Invertebrates post, I used available light for 7 of them even though all seven were captured after I had the 430exii. I think that is probabl a fair reflection of my attitude to flash at that time - I preferred the look of available light images compared to what I was getting with flash, even though flash can help reveal detail. Sometimes flash was essential, when light levels were very low or subjects were small, or moving. But I was more comfortable using available light.
I also used flash at least some of the time with botanical subjects, although I think I probably used it much less often than for invertebrates. For several years now I have almost never used flash for botanical subjects. On reflection I think that was probably a mistake. It is certainly true that flash can give a, to my eye, very unnatural look to botanical images, but used well it doesn't have to. And some fill light could have been very useful for some of my shots as I do tend to shoot into the light a fair amount with the interesting parts of my subjects in deep shadows that then have to be lifted with the usual implications for increased noise and loss of detail. Time to reconsider that I think. (I do find that I tend to get into a rut in terms of technique and fall into using a particular approach out of habit rather than staying alert to what might be more appropriate in particular circumstances.)
Apart from starting to use flash, the other big difference in this period was that I started to visit nature reserves in the Gordano Valley run by Avon WildLife Trust. This was not until the last threee months of my time with the SX10.
Subject matter during my two years with the SX10 was very similar to the two years with the S3is, the only difference being that I photographed a handful of common birds in the garden, and the visits to the nature reserves gave me a wider range of subjects, particularly invertebrates.
I continued to use the Canon 500D, Raynox 150 and Raynox 250 close-up lenses.
Post processing was done in Photoshop CS2, apart from Panoramas, which were processed in AutoPano Pro and then finished in Photoshop.
As with the S3is I looked through all the images I kept from the period, marking up ones that I thought looked ok and/or interesting as I went. I ended up with around 650 images selected, which I have put in this album at Flickr. They are shown with the original processing at the (mainly small) size I processed them. For those in the following posts I upsized them where necessary (which was for most of them) to 1000 pixels high with AI Gigapixel.
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