Getting ready for the next #ShittyCameraChallenge with the Canon Powershot G5

Getting ready for the next #ShittyCameraChallenge with the Canon Powershot G5

Starting the beginning of July there'll be a new Shitty Camera Challenge and I've been thinking about what I might do this time around. I have a couple of ideas, but just lately I'm really enjoying experimenting with a new to me camera, the Canon Powershot G12. The snag is that at 10MP the G12 is not Shitty Camera compliant, and even if it was the camera is just too darn good to use in the Challenge, so I felt that I needed a backup. Something that behaves just like the Powershot G12 but with half of the pixels.

And that's where the Powershot G5 comes in. Originally I found a slightly flakey G5 from the Kamerastore website and then a second one came from the CEX website, advertised as a 'generic' camera but in beautiful condition, for the princely sum of 3€. The PowerShot G5 was the fourth in the G series of digital cameras, introduced by Canon in 2003. It seems to me that ergonomic design was not at the forefront of the designers' minds when they made the Powershot G5 as the best way to describe its look is, 'la brick'. With a 5MP CCD sensor, it features a 4x zoom, an optical viewfinder and a swivelling colour LCD screen. Images are stored on CompactFlash cards, since during the noughties every camera manufacturer seemed to have their own medium for storing photographs.

So I thought it might be a good idea to remind myself how these G5s perform. The G5 from the CEX website was in pristine condition when it arrived, although the battery was not the original Canon battery. On the other hand, the Kamerastore G5 was in slightly worse condition, described as 'glitchy' with a flickering LCD screen, but otherwise working fine. I knew that they both performed well in natural colour, and black and white, but when I tried to make trichromes and digital aerochromes the Kamerstore G5 gave a decidedly strange response.

On consecutive days I took the G5s across the road to my favourite tree and well and around the block in tge woods gehind the house and put them through their paces. With the cameras in programme (P) mode and the ISO set to its lowest setting (50), in colour mode I took one natural colour image and then a second image with the infrared filter for red/blue channel mixing. I then set the G5s to monochrome mode, to one image without a filter and then subsequent images with red, green, blue, and infrared filters to make trichromes and digital aerochromes. Back at home I used GuIMP photo editor to red/blue channel mix the colour infrared image and made trichromes from the red, green, and blue filter images. TO make the digital aerochromes I used the infrared, red, and green filter images for the red, green and blue laters, respectively. Blend mode between layers was set to 'addition'.

The results were fabulous. There was no sign of the strange results from my first experiment and both G5s behaved admirably. I also tried a few infrared channel swapping images and these worked too. Though I have to G5s to chose from with the Shitty Camera Challenge I think I'll start with the older 'glitchy' Powershot G5 and use the Canon LA-DC58B lens filter adapter, which is a little plastic gizmo that fits to the front of the lens of the G5 and allows the use of 58mm circular filters.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the 'Snapshot' WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com@keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#ShittyDigital, #Canon, #Powershot, #Digicam, #Tree, #TrichromeEverything, #Aerochrome, #Trichrome, #ShittyCameraChallenge,