S80, one more time :)

It's kind of a crossover. As of last Monday, I now have my third Canon PowerShot S80, and my third infrared camera. They're one and the same. I don't know what it is; there's just something about the S80 I really like; no other camera I've had feels quite as natural. So while I've moved on to other cameras with better image and video quality since then, when I saw someone in China was selling a raft of PowerShots he reconditions to shoot IR, I had to see if a trusty S80 was among them. It was.

He had other, better models available too, for a lot more. But the S80 is pretty much the most compact PowerShot I've ever seen; they managed to pack just about everything into it and my hands never really stopped hungering to feel the thing again. As I said, I've had two before. One was my workhorse for nearly two years. The other was really just to slake the hankering, but it pretty much just sat around until I found a good home for it in Indiana, where it wouldn't just sit around but would do some real work again, as is this camera's due. Ah, but as an infrared camera, I have reason to start carrying one around again.

It was a little over two hundred dollars, and largely financed by the sale of my first infrared refurb, the G1, to a friend interested in getting into IR photograph himself. So, again, it served two happy purposes: I was getting a better camera for just a few dollars, and I was rescuing the sturdy G1 from sitting on the shelf and getting it into the hands of another amateur photographer.

The S80 has some significant advantages over even the S70 I've been using for IR work over the last couple of years. It's about a quarter smaller, it responds faster, it takes slightly larger pictures (8MP vs 7.1MP) of better quality (Digic II processor vs Digic I), and, best of all, its video abilities are significantly superior. The S70 is limited to recording, at best, 30 seconds of 15 frames-per-second 640x480 video snippets. The S80 can record a full 30 frames-per-second, and the only limit on it is a 1G ceiling on file size. At 640x480, that translates to, on average, about ten minutes (but about 40 minutes at 320x240). I'd prefer something longer (particularly for filming on the road), but ten minutes isn't bad, and it sure beats 30 seconds. Admittedly, the S80 doesn't shoot RAW like the S70, but that's a minor concern, since it's reasonably fast on AEB spreads (one of the reasons I bought my first S80, actually).

I've been putting it through its paces over the last couple of days, and yesterday, one of the Wednesdays P-Doug and I have booked off this year with an eye to hiking and nicely breaking the weeks up, I used it to reshoot the abandoned bridge abutment on 11th Concession (last visited at the end of April, but now with the trees nicely leafed out), and a recently-closed but gorgeous pony truss bridge in Bolton (I'll have to blog on that in particular).

Below: a shot of the lost bridge on 11th Concession location taken with the S70 in late April, and the S80 in early August. The S70 shot is also HDR, composed of three exposures. I like the moodiness and gloom of the first and the bright 'life goes on' solace of the second. :)

Everything old is new again

I had to look it up, but here’s what I know. I bought a second-hand PowerShot G9 early in January last year. Shortly afterwards, in fact, just a week short of a year ago, I sold my PowerShot S80, which I’d carried around for 20 months, to my friend P-Doug for, if memory serves me, $200. That spring, I threw in a spare battery, since he only had the one.

Ever since then, I’ve taken just shy of 10,000 still and moving images with the G9. I’ve dropped it at a basketball game, lost it at a dusky roadside (where it was apparently hit by a passing car) and then found it again after driving half way across the city, and taken it tubing down the Grand River, where its companion, an infrared-reconfigured PowerShot S70, was drenched and cost over $300 to repair. And for all that, I’ve found that I’ve missed the lightness, compactness, and ease of access and control the S80 furnished. And so every so often, I’d look around… eBay, Craigslist…

A couple of weeks ago, I found one being sold on eBay with a starting bid of $35 on it. It was broken – the lens had come open in the guy’s pocket and jammed, leading to the dreaded E18 error that plagues PowerShot cameras. I read up on it to find out what it would cost to repair it, and learned that in such cases, it’s often possible to gently work the lens assembly such that the gears pop back into alignment. So, I bid on it; $51, which raised the bid to $36. The day before the auction ended, someone bid $45, which boosted mine to $46. I decided to hedge my bets and raised my bid to $66. The day the auction ended, a Saturday around noon, I was sitting in the Bishop and the Belcher with P-Doug, keeping an eye on the auction using a wi-fi connection and my little Eee laptop (which I got free from my bank... remember when they used to give you toasters?), refreshing the page every few seconds. With seconds to go, some troll out there bid $52 – which ironically enough would have won it for him if I hadn’t previously raised my limit. In the last six seconds, he gambled I’d bid sixty bucks, and bid $61.05. That raised my bid to $62.05, and he didn’t have time to respond. Screw you, asshole. >:)P

So, for sixty-two bucks US, plus postage, I wrangled… a broken S80. It was a gamble. I hoped I’d be able to overcome the E18 error myself, but if not, I knew a place where I could get the work done. The question was, would it be worth doing? I’d already blown $300 on a camera in the summer I would never have bothered to fix if it weren’t reconditioned to shoot infrared. But, the fellow at the camera shop reckoned it could be fixed for “about $92”… weird number, but that’s what he said. So I felt like one way or the other, it would pay off.

Well, the S80 arrived today, and I started to gently work on the lens assembly. Within a couple of minutes, I heard the “click” while working on the innermost element. I put the battery from my G9 into it, and the S80 sucked the lens assembly back in and then extended it again, and I had a working S80 again. Oh, it sounds rough opening and closing, and I might want to see if there’s something cost-effective they can do about that, but the point is, I got a real bargain. So, after a year, I’m back in the saddle again with an S80.

I’m undecided, just yet, how to handle the issue of the cameras. I don’t hate the G9. It shoots RAW, it does voice recordings, it does better videos than the S80 without the high-pitched whine… but it’s big. Half again as big as the S80. The controls aren’t all gathered to be worked easily with your right thumb. So I’m not sure. I suggested to P-Doug, once I’d won the auction, that I thought maybe the G9 would be my “winter” camera – since I’m not carrying the S70 to shoot infrared much in the winter – and the S80 would be paired with the S70 (as it was in the summer of 2007) to be my “summer” camera(s). I guess we’ll see. Right now, I’m just jazzed to have an S80 again. I honestly don’t know why Canon axed them so quickly; they were only out about eight or nine months – or why they killed off the S line with the S80. An S90, that could shoot RAW (which the S70 can but S80 can’t) and maybe had a bigger, Digimarc III sensor, would have been a big hit, I think.

Run over by a train

P-Doug and I were exploring a railroad bridge about to be replaced a little while back, and while we were up on the tracks, we noticed a freight approaching slowly. We determined to film it passing over our cameras... his S80, and my already battle-scarred G9. We set them on adjacent ties, back to back; the G9 facing the train and the S80 down the track away from it. Between the two cameras, this is the view we got.

Au revoir, mon petit

Earlier this month, on January 8th, I bought a used Canon PowerShot G9 from a professional wedding photographer in Ottawa. For me, this represented the next step up, in several functional respects, from the Canon PowerShot S80 I bought on May 12, 2006 (the first real accounting it gave of itself can be read here), not quite two years ago.

Well, as a result of that purchase, about a week ago I offered the S80 to fellow photographic enthusiast P-Doug. I did it for a number of reasons, but they all basically branch from the fact that the S80 would basically be sitting around doing nothing from now on. The limbs were: I wanted to gain some remuneration; I wanted the camera to remain "in action"; and P-Doug is a friend with photographic experience spanning decades. All-told, it's where the camera needed to be.

In August of 2005 I sold P-Doug my Kodak DC4800 for pretty much all the same reasons when I replaced that camera with the Rebel XT. I've been with him any number of times he's had that camera along on various hikes and tours, and I know he's made good use of it... about as much as I did, given it's not the kind of camera you can carry around with you on a daily basis. But the S80 is a pocket camera in spades, so his output may rise exponentially. We'll see.

When I made the offer a week ago I was sincere, but I nearly immediately regretted it. The S80 was, all things considered, easily the camera I've made the most use of in all my life. For over a year and a half it was pretty much a constant companion, worn on my hip in a fanny pack, rain, shine, snow and whatever. Dozens of gigs of memory are dedicated to containing its output. Today, I went to a local watering hole P-Doug and I favour and I handed the dear thing over. It's now in good expert hands. I know it's silly personifying stuff like this but I can't help it. That camera was essentially part of me for 20 months... it was my eyes and memory. Sorry to say, but it's hard to turn my back on all that and leave it behind even for money.

A little photography on the weekend

On Friday, I bought a Canon Powershot S80... several reasons... it's nearly the P&S equivalent of my Rebel XT (except it literally fits in my pocket), it does AEB spreads, it's 8-megapixal with good macro and unusually wide angle facilities, and I was told it's being discontinued. It's hard to find in Toronto; seems to sell out the minute it hits a store. All good indicators.

And I think it is a heck of a good camera. I've had a lot of fun with it already.

This past weekend the Don Valley Parkway was closed for maintenance. I suggested to P-Doug this was a once-in-dog's-age opportunity to shoot the empty highway, so down we went.


High dynamic range image (created from a three-photo auto-exposure bracketing spread) of the DVP, looking southward in the southbound lanes south of Lawrence Avenue. This was taken using the S80.


High dynamic range, infrared image taken from Lawrence Avenue, looking south (somewhere in this shot is the spot I was standing in the one above). This was taken using my infrared-converted Canon G1.


Climbing up to the onramp/offramp at Lawrence (this shot was taken just before the one above). Again, this is an HDR IR shot taken with my Canon G1.


A crop of a macro shot of a tiny wasp, taken with the S80. The little white dots are salt crystals. This wasp was perhaps 1/16" long, and the lens was about an inch from it when I took the shot.


Another macro shot with the S80.


On Saturday, P-Doug and I took in an art gallery down on King Street. This piece is called "Puppy", and it's by Jeff Koons.