We got some snow this week and the landscape looks just amazing. I can’t help it, I love snow! There’s not too much of the good thing yet so it’s still possible to walk around without problems, just ankle deep mostly. I made good use of it today, took the new road down to Öster-Hocklan and then past the shooting range to Loossjön and back home. It was an 11 km hike, I think I earned my slice of chocolate cake. What a perfect way to spend the day!
I had a new camera with me. I bought the Canon PowerShot S95 compact, which I hope will be everything that the PowerShot G10 wasn’t. The idea with the compact is that I can have it with me even when photography is not the main thing on the agenda. It’s true, sometimes I actually go for a walk just for the sake of the walk! Dragging around a heavy camera/lens combo and a tripod ”just in case” is really not much fun. The S95 is small and light and so easily pocketable that I didn’t even notice I was carrying it. Doing a long walk like the one today is pure pleasure and it’s even better when I know that the image quality is so good that it holds up against the 40D, and I’m not kidding about that. It really is that good. I wouldn’t compare the IQ past ISO 200 of course but it’s not an issue because I would never go beyond ISO 200 with landscape pictures anyway and I doubt I will use the S95 for anything else than landscapes.
The problem I had with the G10 was that it was not small and light, I wouldn’t have stuffed it in the jacket pocket and that horrible 15 megapixels was a real turn-off (and Canon realised it, considering that they reduced it to 10 MP in the follow-up G11). So as soon as the novelty of having it had worn off, I was less and less interested in using it until it got to the point where I realised that I might as well sell it and wait for something better to come up. When I saw the specs for the PowerShot S95, I knew that this was the right compact for me. There is only one thing where the G10 beats the S95 and it’s the zoom range, the G10 went a little longer. So I know that there will be times when I wish I could zoom in a bit further when using the S95, but it’s still a minor problem when everything else about the camera is just so perfect for my needs! Granted, I’ve only used the S95 on a couple of occasions so far so it’s a bit risky to make any grand statements, but I honestly feel that this little camera is very capable and I will have many a good walk with it in the future!