Travel cameras - 2013 onwards

Travel cameras are cameras with small sensors and a large zoom range that are small enough to fit into a pocket. I bought my first one in 2013, a Canon SX240, but I didn't use it much. It was JPEG only, but like my other small sensor JPEG only cameras it was perfectly capable of producing images in good light that were decent enough as long as you didn't pixel peep. This is one of the few SX240 images I came across while trawling through my photos. With a 20X zoom lens (25-500mm full frame equivalent) it was pretty versatile. I don't know why I didn't use it more.

My use of travel cameras increased after I bought a Panasonic TZ60 18 months after getting the SX240. The TZ60 has a small, 1/2.3", 18 megapixel sensor and a 30X zoom lens (24-720mm full frame equivalent). I didn't use it much but when I did, shooting raw, I was sometimes quite surprised at what it would give me. In 2018 it started to malfunction and I bought a TZ90, which is a very similar camera, with a few extras including 4K post focus and a tilting LCD. 

I occasionally used the TZ cameras to document something, such as what our garden shed looked like after a tree (by then removed) fell on it.

Mostly though I used it for things that turned up when I was out and about our small town. For example, the next one came about when I was stuck in a supermarket car park, unable to get out of the parking space I was in. There had been an accident out of town and the traffic had backed up and was jammed solid in town. I decided to go for a little walk to while away the time and came across this heron beside one of the local rhynes (a drainage ditch used to take the water away from the very flat area, close to sea level, that the town is built on).

The next one was at the local marina one day when I was having a little wander around.

I'm not sure, but I think the next one may have been captured out of a bedroom window.

The road I drive along to and from the shops has a view out over the Severn Estuary and sometimes I spot something interesting and drive down to the waterside to take some photos. That was the case with this Offshore installation/maintenace/repair vehicle being moved downstream by a tug.

Sometimes I would take photos as I went for a walk along the coast path. 

We don't go out of town much, but when we do visit somewhere I can carry a TZ around unobtrusively and take a few snapshots. These were captured while chatting with my in-laws as we wandered around the National Trust garden at Stourhead.