"Always carry a camera, it's tough to shoot a picture without one." - 365 Project, Day 346

All cameras can shoot video (and most of them in high definition), most cameras can shoot black and white and sepia (for some reason Sony forgoes these filters), some cameras have a burst mode of up to 60 photos in a second, some cameras can yet do more, such as in-camera panorama shots, in-camera HDR, in addition to every colour filters and effect you can think of.  My Canon S100 can even do super-slow-mo at 240 frames per second (which, by the way, is a lot of fun to watch).  Oh, and they also take normal pictures.  This last feature is the only thing that, by my estimation, 70-80% of people buying a camera want out of a camera.

Why add all these bells and whistles?  I pride myself on utilising any gizmo I have to its full potential.  A few people have actually commented on how I use keyboard shortcuts to do what I want instead of always using the mouse, for example.  I've used more options in the Fuji X10 and Canon S100 than most people, I believe, but there are a few modes I would never try (such as toy camera effect, colour swap on the S100, and the pro- portrait and low-light modes on the X10.  I do like a lot of these little features, but even I can't see the use of some of these.  Some filters and features in the S100 are useful: fisheye can't be done easily without Photoshop, and so is nice to have in-camera, and ditto for in-camera HDR.  The Movie Digest mode is fun to have because editing small clips together is time-consuming and tough to process on an older laptop.  However, some of the simpler things are mind-boggling to me.

If this camera can do RAW, and is, say $450, this isn't a camera for the general population, and so people buying this probably won't mind, say, taking the RAW file and creating a black-and-white shot out of it, or taking  a picture and making a fake lomography effect.  I suppose if Canon offers some of these effects on their lower-end cameras, they'll justify the price of more expensive cameras by simply including these bells and whistles for people who won't use this camera for RAW shooting.  However, this gets back to the question of my spend $450 on a compact if you're not going to take advantage of everything it can do?  Maybe I just don't get it.

Here's what we did get today.

Frank

His note: Indispensable tool.

My shot

My friend asked me to take a picture of the sunset today, so I figured a panorama shot would be a good idea.  This is pretty much my view from my balcony - all of it.

Find out what will happen to us tomorrow.