New camera

During our trip to the Lakes last year, to climb Helvellyn via Striding Edge with my sister and her man (oddly, I didn't write anything about this, but we did!), we managed to drown both our digital camera and a mobile phone. They were wrapped up safely in rucksacks but it was so wet that they filled with water anyway and they never came back to life.

So, after phoning the insurance people and a bit of research, we've bought a new digital camera. We've bought a Canon Ixus 70 because:

1. We've had a Canon before, they're well built (but not waterproof) and we know how to use them
2. It's pocket-sized but has a 3x optical zoom and all the features we need.
3. We'd hoped for a fully-manual mode but there are hard to find on compact cameras. You can manually adjust the ISO setting, but there's no aperture or time priority. But then no other camera we looked at had those either.
4. The flash on our old Canon SureShot A80 was horrible, but this one, in testing, seems to have been improved.
5. We chose the Ixus 70 over the Ixus 75 mostly because it has a smaller screen and therefore better battery life.

Overall we're happy with the purchase. It's small, takes good snaps, the battery lasts long enough (though I don't like having a rechargable - our old one just took standard AA batteries). It's all we expected really. I guess, to the untrained eye, digital cameras are much of a muchness and though the Ixus 70 is nothing extraordinary, it is a well-built and easy to use camera.

It has one feature that I particularly like though - it does time-lapse filming! You can only set it to take a picture every 1 second or two seconds, and it kills the battery pretty quickly, but I've had some fun playing around with it and it gives interesting results. It has prompted a bit of a fascination with life-at-high-speed.

I first started playing around with this after a day's working from home. Here's a bit of me at the laptop - it's quite boring but I had no other subject to try it out on:




For a laugh I tried moving really slowly to see what would happen when speeded back up again. This has a strange stop-motion animation effect and makes me laugh every time:



I wonder what sort of life-observation could be had with this. Look out for speeded-up naturewatch movies next spring!