Not too bad, eh?  If you want to hear my thoughts on why you’d want a Point and Shoot vs. a DSLR and all about the S90, hit the jump for more…

It took me a while to come around to this but if you check out my post count, you’ll probably notice the lack of new stuff.  Life gets busy, things fall out – recently it was photography, and that didn’t feel good.  I was also racking up a lot of “I wish I had my camera”  moments, but at the same time, I wasn’t ready to give up some things I’d grown used to.  A short list of things that DSLRs do that Point and Shoots mostly do not:

• Shutter lag – this is huge.  When you press the shutter and get a picture a second or more later, that can be a real problem.
• Picture quality – things might have changed lately, but grainy, poorly exposed, flat shots were usually the order of the day.
• RAW support – I take all my pictures in RAW with my DSLR, which means I can unleash all the quality the image has to offer, not just the quality left after the camera makes some decisions about what it thinks would be best.
• Fast glass – most P&Ss have really slow lenses.  This means no bokeh, bad low-light performance, and not much depth of field control.

The S90 does go a long way to addressing most of these issues:

• It packs the DIGIC IV processor, which is the same one as in my Rebel T1i, so you’ve got some real horsepower.  This means less shutter lag (fast processors really help), high megapixel count, and pretty decent high ISO support.
• F/1.8 lens.  Yes, it isn’t through the whole zoom range, but the fact that you can get down to 1.8 means you can blur out the background (see above!) and should mean you can shoot better in low light as well.  This is even faster than the P&S that Canon builds to be a backup for pros with DSLRs (the G11).
• RAW Support – yup, just like on my DSLR, I can shoot RAW here too.  This means no workflow changes and any performance I can claw back from the small glass is there for the taking.

There are still problems, of course.  The shutter lag is very short but still longer than my DSLR.  The zoom lens gives you a ton of bang for your buck, but at the end of the day, it is what it is – no special macro lenses, no super fast primes, no mega zooms.  Speaking of that lens, it might be pretty fast, but the glass is still pretty tiny.  That means your pictures still won’t touch what a DSLR turns out, but you’ll have a picture, which is infinitely better than thinking about what you might have, had you brought your camera with you.

For now, I can take pictures again, and hopefully that means doing more of what I love.  If you see more shots on the blog, you’ll know it’s actually true.  Let me know what you think of the new shot, and I’ll try and post more shots from the camera and maybe some pictures of the camera too.

The Best Camera Is The One You Use is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

One thing this shares with the earlier one from the same series is they both have that creamy smooth bokeh going on, thanks to the 50mm lens.  It might be the cheapest lens I have but it’s also the only one that lets you blur the background just so.  I’m not sure this one has the punch that the other does, but I like the highlights around the SFD helmet and how when things are sharp, they’re sharp.

You Best Protect Your Neck is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I shot this one portrait style – maximum aperture for minimum depth of field.  It’s not the most original picture.  Lots of people have seen a dandelion before, but I really like how the grass just dissolves into a sheet of green.  As one reader with much better skills than I have said, the rule for wildlife photography is to nail the focus on the eyes.  I guess my correlary is when shooting weeds, nail the part that would be the eye if this thing came to life.  And then watch your back – you never know when the anthropomorphic dandelion zombies might get you.

Dandelion: Full Of Possibilities is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Just strolling the hill the other day and noticed this house. Since the crappy rowhouses just down the way (and right across the street from a hospital and a 7-11) are going for 600k (good luck with that), this place must be “worth” even more. When you need to put barbed wire around it, maybe you need to start thinking about why your neighbors hate you.  Anyway, I just like the picture.   Love that dreamy bokeh – without it, you could never make the barbed wire stand out in front of a subject like this.

When You Should Worry is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

For more info on how it works and all the nerdly stuff, hit the jump.

The reason the lights look octagonal in the link above is because you’re seeing the blades of the aperture – the small hole in the lens that lets the light in.  If you get a lens with a big enough aperture (like my favorite 50mm lens with a massive f/1.8), you can make your own smaller, shaped aperture and put it in front of it.  From what I’ve read here and here, the equation is your lens focal length (so 50mm in my case), divided by your maximum aperture (1.8 in my case) gets you 27.7mm, which is the max size that the hole can be and still be effective.  Now all you need to do is make a black paper cover for the front of your lens with the shape you’d like in your pictures in front.  I’ve got hearts and stars.

With the cover fitted over your lens, you should be able to see the results right through the viewfinder, so your results shouldn’t be a surprise.  There are a few other guidelines I haven’t seen posted elsewhere:

• This only works with points of light, not the sun or big lightbulbs, unless they’re far enough away.  This means mostly shots at night, unless you have a suitably darkened room during the day.
• The shapes will only appear when the lens is thrown full out of focus, which means either you need a subject very close to the lens in the foreground and the lights in the background or you are going to have a picture with no in-focus subject.
• Creating a new aperture means that you’re cutting down on the light available for the camera.  The camera will meter through your new aperture, so the pictures should be properly exposed, but you might want to compose without the lens hood on, then slip it on to take the picture.
• Make sure you’re in Aperture Priority mode (Av on most cameras) and that your aperture is set wide open (the lowest number you’ve got.
• You probably also want to focus the camera manually (or automatically and then flip it into manual mode) so that you keep the wildly out-of-focus background you’re going for.
• Since you’re taking pictures in a dark environment and the flash is out, you’re probably going to want to use a tripod, or at least set the camera down on something.  You can make some cool patterns with the blur, but you lose most of the shape effect.

Other than that, it’s really not too hard and with a material cost approaching zero, why not give it a shot?

DIY Bokeh or “how to make pretty stars” is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

• ApertureValue: f/1.8
• DateTimeOriginal: 2008:12:13 22:03:31
• ExposureTime: 1/4 sec
• Flash: No Flash
• FocalLength: 50 mm
• ISOSpeedRatings: 800
• Model: Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT

Snow Fountain is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

My friend Charlie has these neighbors.  It’s not so much that they’re crazy, in a medically-diagnosed kinda way, but they sure don’t like throwing things out.  The yard is full of tarp-covered “finds” – it’s all very great depression.  In any case, they also have a great little chain-link fence out front, which they decided to decorate.  With bread tags.  To each his own, right?  Back to the photography.

This one is shot with the same macro lens, but for a different reason.  I really like the blurry look – there is a lot going on in the frame and blurring out most of it makes me happy, which this lens is great at.  The photo snobs call that “bokeh”, which loosely translates from it’s Japanese origins to “some stuff is blurry and some stuff isn’t”.  Anyway, here it is.

More macro, minus the tools is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures