The Little Elph
The new camera hunt is over and I am back on the mountain top, looking out over the digital frontier – poised and ready to capture everything that falls in front of my viewfinder. I elected to go with a camera that was robust yet entirely portable and procured the pocket sized Canon Elph. I flirted briefly with the Pentax Digital SLR only because I was told that it was designed to be back compatible with old school analog Pentax lenses, of which I have several. But upon further investigation I learned that although the old lenses do indeed fit on the newer digital SLR cameras, it’s virtually impossible to get an accurate f/stop reading. One has to experiment by taking multiple pictures and then look at the LCD screen to see if the light and exposure are correct. Tedious.

So far the little Elph is proving to be the little camera that could. The biggest improvement over my last digital camera is the quick shutter speed and the almost nonexistent delay between pressing the shutter and capturing the image. There are a whole bunch of bells and whistles on the camera that I’ll probably never use. One of those is something called ‘color swap’, which allows the user to pick a color from any object in the viewfinder and then swap it for another color. So, for example, you could pick out the color red on a red car and then take a picture of a green car and just like that the green car becomes red. Interesting enough, but nothing I thought I would ever use. But then I started doing the color swap thing with my neighbors house, the results of which made me think this could be a really useful feature if somebody was thinking of repainting the exterior of their house or even the interior for that matter.

I think it would definitely be an improvement over simple paint chips. Although, one could pick a paint chip color and swap it in for the current color of the house. In the example above, I took one photo of my neighbors garage, which is painted a color I will call ‘latte’. Then I used the color swap mode and took three more pictures, painting the garage yellow, green, and dark gray. Those colors were pulled from a yellow bag of sidewalk salt, a green leaf, and a garbage can. As you can see the results are not perfect but it gives a fairly good idea of what the garage might look like in those colors.