The Canon G11 has helped me in my new personal project to hone my skills better: composition by color. The design and feel of the camera helps with this greatly. It tested it upon a visit to the Museum of New York to really see how I could turn everyday normal things into something that makes interesting photos.
As stated before, the colors that comes out of this camera’s photos are wonderful. Granted, they don’t have the silky smooth look that a CMOS sensor will provide for you. However, the CCD in the G11 still does the job well since there is also a DIGIC IV processor to keep image noise down and the camera has a lens that opens up to F2.8 at its widest aperture.
I’ve typically composed my images before using what is around in the space and also by selecting different angles to play with these subjects. Now I’m starting to compose by color. Composing by color means that one uses colors as their main subjects in the photo and starts to arrange their framing around these colors. Using the adjustable screen, this becomes easier to do as the camera can take pictures in situations where it would otherwise be very difficult or may require a Hail Mary photo of some sort. Because of this, I’m very grateful that it is there and will miss it when this camera goes back to Canon.
As always, centering your subjects can be the death of your photo. It makes for pictures that aren’t very interesting and that tend to be bland when viewers go through loads of them. Using the button to allow the user to go from shutter speed, aperture, metering, and focusing, one can manually focus their image and then recompose. Additionally, one can move the little square on the screen to tell the camera to focus on the designated area that the photographer wants.
Another reason why that screen is so great is because of the fact that the viewfinder is essentially very useless. All that it allows the user to do is frame their image. If they want to focus, they need to look at the back screen. A situation where using the viewfinder would be useful would be when one needs extra stability. Holding the camera closer to you stabilizes it. As one will see often when taking pictures with it, the back screen will often tell you to keep the camera still to prevent the effects of camera shake.
Something else that should be noted: it’s a very nice feeling to be able to adjust the ISO on a camera without fear of getting terribly noisy images. The sensor coupled with the new processor and lens make for a great combination that can deliver decent high ISO images that can become quite delicious in post processing. In truth, all one would really need is something like Lightroom.
More coming from the review! Since this is a point-and-shoot we won’t be spending a seriously long time with it.
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