Twenty Something Sense

The typical $200 camera gets lugged around from bar to bar snapping blurry shots of your intoxicated friends. What’s often times forgotten are the plethora of features that are packed into these relatively cheap pocket size cameras. Here are four features that I found deep in the menus on my Canon SD750 while traveling down under a few weeks back.

Photo Stitch
This feature allows you to take several photos of a wide panoramic view (for example Sydney Harbour) and then merge them together later on the computer to make one picture. The camera feature only helps you line up the photos, when you get back to the computer a program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 will help you stitch them all back together.

Source Photos

Final Product

Color Accent
Another cool feature I found is the ability to choose one color in the photo to accent and leave the rest of the photo black and white. Although this can be done after you take the photo in most editing programs, I found it convenient to be able to see the results immediately while on the scene. This one was taken in the Sydney Opera House.

Extended Shutter Time
Walking around Darling Harbour in Sydney at night was beautiful. Trying to take a picture of it was difficult because no matter how bright it appeared to be because of all of the lit up buildings, the images always showed up black on the camera. Most digital cameras offer you the ability to leave the shutter open for a couple of seconds which allows your camera to capture enough light to produce a good night photo. When doing this, be sure to put your camera on a steady ledge or else you will end up with a blurry mess.

Time Lapse Video
This is by far my favorite newly found feature. My camera is a couple of years old and has it, so my guess is that most newer cameras have this as well.