for some of the better photos of the day - go to this thread: http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/canon-corner/312948-s90-pics.html
This was my first trip out with the camera - and I'd only taken a dozen or so pics on land before hand, so this was a bit of a learning experience. My previous camera was the Canon S80 (with Ikelite housing).
I deliberately went out with no strobe to see how it worked just with the on board flash - my main concern was how to get close up pics without having the port cast a shadow (and without NEEDING the external strobe). This was not an issue with my old S80 as the port didn't protrude but I had heard it was an issue with the G series cameras. Although I own a strobe, for travelling I often travel without one.
First : here is the camera and housing. Extremely compact compared to my last one.
as you can see there is a little "ring" that goes around the cameras control ring - this allows you to turn it using the control you see to the right of the lens port on the housing.
NOTE: If you put it on backwards it does not allow you to turn the control ring (it slips), but correctly fitted it works well ! (so test that you have it on correctly before diving
)
The control ring easily lets you change the appeture in Av mode or Shutter Speed in Tv mode.
If you are in Manual or Custom Mode, you can use this in conjuntion with the Ring func button to set Appeture, Shutter Speed, ISo, WB etc. (but you need to read the manual before diving so you know how to do it!)
One of the things I never had to contend with on the S80 was the shadow caused by the port blocking the flash. Adding the diffuser reduced this, but it is still visible unless you zoom a little. Luckily it seemed to remember the "zoom" and each time i woke the camera up from its power saving it returned to how i had set it. It did mean I had to check my pics a little more often and reshoot a couple.
for example, on the following pic you can see the shadow:
but after a little zoom and recomposition:
here is another example, quite marked shadow:
but recomposed, zoomed a little (only a very small amount of zoom needed) and the macro setting selected, came the following quite pleasing result:
The first pics I tried with the C and M mode which I had setup beforehand. This was reasonably unsuccessful and the pics were very dark , so switched to Av mode and had similarly crap results. While getting frustrated (the first 20 pics were deleted straight off the bat), switched to Tv mode with 1/100th, and BAM - started to get some good shots and was no longer frustrated !! The focus and shooting speed is so much better than my old camera.
Of course I didn't have the manual with me and didn't want to open the housing on the boat, so spent the rest of the day happily shooting in Tv mode. I believe I had the Iso set to 100 on the other modes and on ISO 80 on Tv which made quite a bit of difference.
The one thing I need to get used to - it seems difficult to use the on/off button. not sure if it is just how the camera is or just me needing to get used to it or if it was a feature of the "power saving". I found i really had to push down the button and on one of the dives this didn't seem to work. I ended up finding a "work around" by pressing the "image playback" button to "wake the camera up" and then press the shutter and it would start to work. Probably I just need to get the manual out or play a bit more to see what really is going on and what i need to press.
For the really low light shots (without flash at depth) the camera IS thing seemed to work pretty well and got a couple of reasonable jewfish shots at 1/15th and 1/30th sec. although at 1/6 it was a little blurred !
I also had thought I'd set up the camera for RAW (so i could see how the post processing setting of WB worked), but found in fact I hadn't (just the big jpgs), so can't comment on that. After realizing, i then set it up on land and found that I needed to upgrade Lightroom from 2.4 to 2.6 (it's a free upgrade) to use the S90 raw format, and that i can't display the RAWs on my windows explorer as canon haven't released the codec yet (and an annoying pop-up offers to take you to the canon website to download a codec that doesn't include the S90 or 7D raw format !) - funny that Adobe created one for their products and Canon didn't do one yet !!
So after a few shaky shots at the start (where I swore I'd take my old camera on my trip next week), I really like the camera and think it has a lot of potential. .. and since getting back i've looked up how to set and change of few of the things that frustrated me ! (and I'll take the manual with me on the trip )
This was my first trip out with the camera - and I'd only taken a dozen or so pics on land before hand, so this was a bit of a learning experience. My previous camera was the Canon S80 (with Ikelite housing).
I deliberately went out with no strobe to see how it worked just with the on board flash - my main concern was how to get close up pics without having the port cast a shadow (and without NEEDING the external strobe). This was not an issue with my old S80 as the port didn't protrude but I had heard it was an issue with the G series cameras. Although I own a strobe, for travelling I often travel without one.
First : here is the camera and housing. Extremely compact compared to my last one.
as you can see there is a little "ring" that goes around the cameras control ring - this allows you to turn it using the control you see to the right of the lens port on the housing.
NOTE: If you put it on backwards it does not allow you to turn the control ring (it slips), but correctly fitted it works well ! (so test that you have it on correctly before diving
)The control ring easily lets you change the appeture in Av mode or Shutter Speed in Tv mode.
If you are in Manual or Custom Mode, you can use this in conjuntion with the Ring func button to set Appeture, Shutter Speed, ISo, WB etc. (but you need to read the manual before diving so you know how to do it!)
One of the things I never had to contend with on the S80 was the shadow caused by the port blocking the flash. Adding the diffuser reduced this, but it is still visible unless you zoom a little. Luckily it seemed to remember the "zoom" and each time i woke the camera up from its power saving it returned to how i had set it. It did mean I had to check my pics a little more often and reshoot a couple.
for example, on the following pic you can see the shadow:
but after a little zoom and recomposition:
here is another example, quite marked shadow:
but recomposed, zoomed a little (only a very small amount of zoom needed) and the macro setting selected, came the following quite pleasing result:
The first pics I tried with the C and M mode which I had setup beforehand. This was reasonably unsuccessful and the pics were very dark , so switched to Av mode and had similarly crap results. While getting frustrated (the first 20 pics were deleted straight off the bat), switched to Tv mode with 1/100th, and BAM - started to get some good shots and was no longer frustrated !! The focus and shooting speed is so much better than my old camera.
Of course I didn't have the manual with me and didn't want to open the housing on the boat, so spent the rest of the day happily shooting in Tv mode. I believe I had the Iso set to 100 on the other modes and on ISO 80 on Tv which made quite a bit of difference.
The one thing I need to get used to - it seems difficult to use the on/off button. not sure if it is just how the camera is or just me needing to get used to it or if it was a feature of the "power saving". I found i really had to push down the button and on one of the dives this didn't seem to work. I ended up finding a "work around" by pressing the "image playback" button to "wake the camera up" and then press the shutter and it would start to work. Probably I just need to get the manual out or play a bit more to see what really is going on and what i need to press.
For the really low light shots (without flash at depth) the camera IS thing seemed to work pretty well and got a couple of reasonable jewfish shots at 1/15th and 1/30th sec. although at 1/6 it was a little blurred !
I also had thought I'd set up the camera for RAW (so i could see how the post processing setting of WB worked), but found in fact I hadn't (just the big jpgs), so can't comment on that. After realizing, i then set it up on land and found that I needed to upgrade Lightroom from 2.4 to 2.6 (it's a free upgrade) to use the S90 raw format, and that i can't display the RAWs on my windows explorer as canon haven't released the codec yet (and an annoying pop-up offers to take you to the canon website to download a codec that doesn't include the S90 or 7D raw format !) - funny that Adobe created one for their products and Canon didn't do one yet !!
So after a few shaky shots at the start (where I swore I'd take my old camera on my trip next week), I really like the camera and think it has a lot of potential. .. and since getting back i've looked up how to set and change of few of the things that frustrated me ! (and I'll take the manual with me on the trip
)
