About a year and month ago, I posted a small gallery of photos on my blog (the old version of my blog… the one I had to delete because it got hacked… but I’m not bitter). I had taken some pictures at Lawrencetown Beach (here in Nova Scotia), and they’d turned out pretty well, especially considering that I’d been using a little HP Photosmart M437 that had no viewfinder. The LCD screen had been damnably hard to see in the bright sunlight, so I really wasn’t sure if I was getting the shots I wanted.

Thankfullly, most of them came out pretty well. Well enough that I felt inspired to post them on my blog. I received some nice comments from readers (including a photographer friend of mine, whom I deeply respect and whom I am interviewing for this blog’s Voices of Reason Project… no, the project is not forgotten… it is still in progress), and I got to thinking how nice it would be to get back into photography again. Time was, many years back, that I worked at the camera counter of a department store and learned quite a bit about photography from the experience. I took some fairly experimental pictures back in those days, and my Lawrencetown adventure stirred in me that old familiar longing to get out and start a-shootin’.

But dammit, I wanted a viewfinder. The little HP Photosmart takes nice pictures and all, but I wanted something with a bit more chutzpah, something a bit more flexible. I still have the old Yashica FX-2 SLR (which I like to brag is “fully manual”) that I got in 1976 or 1977, not long after it came out, but having become accustomed to taking digital photos, I was loath to go back to the hit-and-miss-and-wait world of film photography.

So I started doing my research. I originally wanted to get a digital SLR, but they’re fairly pricey and generally require multiple lenses for any kind of focal length variety, so I started looking at higher-end point-and-shoot models, of which there are a fair number.

My research led me to the Canon Powershot SX20 IS, which is a mouthful to say, but mouthwatering in terms of the sheer number of features it possesses. It’s one helluva camera, and I’m tickled to finally own one. I bought it three days ago, and I’m absolutely staggered by the number of shooting modes it has and the number of parameters you can change in each of those shooting modes. It’s a little mind-boggling, to be honest, and I’ve only scratched the surface thus far.

The main features that appealed to me were threefold: 1) It has a viewfinder, 2) it has an incredible 20-times zoom (that’s optical zoom, without digital assistance), and 3) it takes High-Def video with stereo sound.

Those features alone would probably have been enough to sell me on the camera, but there is much, much more. First off, it shoots at 12.1 megapixels, has a fold-out 2.5-inch LCD display that will turn to just about any angle you might need, and sports a built-in flash that you can fold down when you’re not using it. You can also hook the camera up to your TV with either a video cable (supplied) or an HD cable to show off your video clips or run a slideshow.

It’s pretty freakin’ amazing.

Okay, so the viewfinder is no great shakes. It’s a video viewfinder, not an optical one, so the detail is not nearly as sharp as in the LCD display. But it’s a viewfinder; it let’s me compose shots in bright sunlight when the display is washed out. Most of the time I’ll be using the diplay, but when I need the viewfinder, it’s there. End of story.

The number of shooting modes the SX20 IS offers is nothing short of staggering. I’ve been shooting mostly in “Auto” mode, just while I become familiar with the camera, but it has “Portrait” mode, “Landscape” mode, “Night Snapshot” mode, “Sports” mode (which allows you to take multiple continuous shots of a moving subject), and “Scene” mode (which itself has a mind-boggling array of sub-modes). Not to mention “Movie” mode.

For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to focus (haha) on a couple of modes that I find particularly interesting: specifically “Sunset” mode and “Color Accent” mode, both of which are sub-modes of “Scene” mode.

“Sunset” mode basically enhances the reds and oranges in the shot. It’s the perfect mode for sunsets, because, well, when you’re looking at a sunset, you want to see deep reds and oranges. Yes, it’s a cheat, but the results can be dramatic. The shots I’m including here were taken earlier this evening, and despite the fact that they were taken only a few seconds apart, the colors of the sky are much more dramatic in the second image, which was taken in “Sunset” mode.

Another mode I find intriguing is “Color Accent” mode. Now, this is not something most people would use all that frequently, but it’s a cool effect, and it makes certain types of shots really interesting. Basically what it does is allow you to pick a color somewhere in the scene and turn everything that’s not that color to black and white. It always makes me think of the scenes in Schindler’s List where the little girl’s coat is bright red in an otherwise completely black-and-white motion picture. Again, I’m including some sample shots that I took earlier, where I chose the red of the couch, and everything that does not have that red in it is rendered as black and white.

One final feature that I’d like to touch on is “Macro” mode. This is not a shooting mode or a sub-mode of “Scene” mode, but rather a focusing mode that’s available in some of the shooting modes. It doesn’t work in “Auto” mode, “Landscape” mode, or any of the submodes of “Scene” mode that assume you’re taking a wide shot. But when it’s available, it allows you to move the camera extremely close to the subject. There are two macro settings: “Macro” and “Super-Macro”. “Macro”, according to the manual, allows you to move as close to your subject as 50cm all the way down to 10cm with the lens at maximum wide angle. In reality, it allows you to move in much closer than that. “Super Macro” allows you to move in closer still, from 10cm right down to 0cm. At 0cm, the lens is actually touching the subject, and it still gives you sharp focus.

In reality, you can only get so close to your subject without the camera casting a shadow across it. In the right lighting conditions, however, this feature could work phenomenally well.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, but suffice it to say that the Canon Powershot SX20 IS is one incredible piece of gear, and one that I’m going to be exploring as fully as possible as I reacquaint myself with the wonders of photography.

I’m even tempted to start a separate photo blog. We’ll see…

Let’s keep it real out there.