My PowerShot Elph impressions (plus photos, of course)

If you follow me on Facebook, you know that at Mr. FG’s company Christmas party, I won a Canon PowerShot Elph camera.

(Here’s the updated 2014 version of that camera: Canon PowerShot ELPH 150 IS Digital Camera.)

At first, I felt bad and I was a little like, “What in the world do I need this for?? Someone else should have won it!”.

Which is sort of understandable, I think, because I own two SLRs, one of which is super-duper nice (Hi, 7d!)

But I’m discovering that it’s fun to play around with this, and I like the challenge of trying to take good pictures with a camera that is not as good as what I’m used to. Plus, I can happily let Sonia take pictures with it (she’s always asking if she can use my Rebel, and I’m almost always saying, “No, sweetie.”)

Want to see how well this camera works? I went around my house randomly photographing things so I could show you!

Here are a few sets of photos. In each group, the first was taken with the PowerShot and the second with my Rebel.

See the bokeh in that last one? I’ve never been able to get that with a point and shoot because they’re designed to keep as much as possible in focus (that’s why it’s hard to use them for lovely portraits…the background is almost always in focus.)

However, as is usually the case with any camera, you can take a fairly nice picture if you follow some simple photography rules (I’m working on writing an ebook about that, actually).

Or if you break them all, you can turn out something like this.

For comparison’s sake, here’s the same set of photos taken with my Rebel and my 50mm lens.

Good.

Not so good. Although, it’s harder to take a terrible picture with an SLR.

(props to Sonia for being my guinea pig)

There are a few things I really miss when I’m using a point and shoot.

-image quality

I notice this especially when I’m photographing people. Point and shoots just don’t have that fabulous clear, crisp focus. This is less noticeable to me when I’m taking pictures of nature (check out this sunset photo!), but as we all know, I don’t do that terribly often. 😉

-the ability to focus on people’s eyes.

With an SLR, I always manually choose my focal point, and when I’m taking a picture of a person, I put the focal point right on the eyes. I can’t do that with a point and shoot.

-the ability to adjust for non-optimal shooting circumstances

A point and shoot can produce some fairly decent pictures if the lighting is good, but they generally have trouble when you’re shooting in low light (gotta use the flash then), or when your subject is backlit.

-the ability to change aperture.

I don’t mess with my shutter speed a whole lot, but I do love to change my aperture. There’s no way to do that on a point and shoot.

That said, I do think this Elph is quite nice as point and shoots go. I really like that it barely hesitates to take a photo after I press the shutter button (that’s normally one of my main gripes with point and shoots), the size can’t be beat, and the picture quality, especially outdoors, is good for a point and shoot.

The black/grey Elph sells for $109 at Amazon, although the snazzy blue one I own is $169.

That makes no sense.

I mean, the blue IS very snazzy, but not that snazzy.

Anyway, for $109, I think this is a good camera. It’s not as good as my SLRs, but we’re comparing a $500 body and $400 lens to a $109 camera/lens combo. That’s almost an $800 difference, and if you take that into consideration, the Elph photos are pretty impressive.

If you’re looking for an affordable, simple, small camera, the Canon PowerShot ELPH   could be a good choice for you.

Now, I wanted to also share with you my SLR recommendations because I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking me about that. I was going to add all that info to this post, but it made an already long post unbearably long!

So, come back this afternoon to read about what SLR equipment I like.

disclosure: this post contains affiliate links