November, 2012

Yet more from the antiquated Canon PowerShot G5. All the above taken in 2004. I’m noticing more and more that plenty of dynamic range can be pulled from the RAW files from this camera. Enough so that I’m tempted to buy a G5 on Ebay and start shooting with one again to compare it to my DSLRs and Micro Four Thirds gear. I turned off all the sharpening in the Lightroom develop module, and also in the export dialog because the more I look at it, the more ugly I think digital sharpening is.

From 2003, going back through the archives to see what I shot. I remember carrying the G5 with me everywhere, just as I do with my camera now. I didn’t know a thing about manual exposure, but I began to learn on that camera, since it was the first digital camera I owned that had manual controls. I owned a G3 ever so briefly, but I returned it and got the G5 which was sparkly new at the time. It was slow and clunky, but it had an f2 lens…even though I didn’t know what that meant at the time.

 

The Canon PowerShot G5. An archaic, small-sensor digital camera (before I knew, or cared, what a small-sensor digital camera was) that, looking back, had a lot of shortcomings. It was slow. The sensor, at 5 megapixels, was considered far too “pixel dense” at the time, and many people complained of chromatic aberrations and purple fringing. But it had a few things really going for it. Mainly, the thing shot pictures in RAW format. I decided I’d bring RAW files into the latest version of Lightroom (4.2 as of this writing) to see what I could pull out of the files.

It is interesting to see how much information was in these files, and to see how improved software can bring a lot out of them but it’s even more interesting to see how personal tastes in post production change, too. I’m glad I was shooting RAW back then–there’s a lot in these pictures that I just didn’t see those many years ago. For you EXIF peepers, the image dates state 2011, but these pictures were taken in June of 2004, and I sold the G5 to fund a purchase of my first digital SLR back in 2005 (a Canon EOS Rebel XT).