Thrifted Camera Of The Month: Good Sunday Morning – The $24 Canon Powershot SX10 IS Arrives!

“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.”

― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Hey, the Powershot came in the mail, and the screen actually works! Well, except in one position, so it’s a problem with the microswitch that determines what position the screen is rotated in. That I can live with easily, as I’d really only need the screen to do timelapses and other tripod work. I already set it to not review images when taken, so it’s basically like shooting film – I’ll just have to trust my eye and what it sees in the viewfinder when I hit the trigger.

These photos are all JPG straight out of camera & dropped into Photoshop 7 for a quick “Auto Color” and resize to 1000px wide. No crop, so as framed in the EVF. The EVF is a bit pixelly, as this camera came out in 2007 and is now near 20 years old, but it does a pretty good job of letting me know what I’ll end up getting.

Colors pretty good, and detail good even at max zoom. Just shot a bunch of stuff in AUTO mode last night and this morning, just to get a feel for what the thing can do when left mostly to its own devices.

I’m *very* impressed at this thing’s Image Stabilization. I don’t have very many cameras that do that at all, but I’ve been shooting a lot of handheld shots right from the front porch at max zoom in not great light, and getting pretty sharp results. The 100mm max optical zoom on this sensor is the 35mm equivalent of 560mm, and I’d need a tripod and a remote shutter to do this with an SLR with a 500mm lens on the front.

Again I must stress how there are NO 90 degree angles or flat surfaces in this town. Except for that blue rope hanging from a tree branch. Gravity assures us that I am holding the camera straight and true.

The Macro mode is pretty nice too. Also does “Supermacro” but I’ll have to read the manual to figure that setting out.

Again, that IS is doing work here, handheld in the dark @ 28mm equiv.

And in the morning, still from the porch, zooming around with the image stabilization on.

Employee Parking everywhere, except…

Here. Hah! This one amused me a lot. Misplaced thrones are something of a theme here in Yankee Territory.

Updated: September 2, 2026 — 9:15 pm

8 Comments

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  1. Excellent PowerShot photos! I love me some signage photography.

  2. You’re plenty eccentric for any town, regardless the number of horses who live there.

  3. Your new to you camera seems to be quite nice. I wonder….Who sits on the ceramic throne?

    At least you do not live in WVA where all the excess thrones (seems many people have then) are filled with flowers.

  4. Lovin’ the photos and the typecast. Also: you? Eccentric? Pshaw!

    1. Every Twin Peaks needs a Dr. Jacoby. (:

  5. One of my favorite photos in this series is the photo that includes a fallout shelter sign. Apart from the camera, this remnant of the Cold War might well be overlooked.

    1. Lots of them here – one of the bennies of living in a place where people always dug basements in which to hide the utilities and the gimp. (:

      1. Yes, my wife and I once toured a house while house hunting, and the house had a thick bomb shelter in its basement — I guess ordinary folks were frightened back when the house was constructed in the 1950s. I guess the shelter would’ve provided good protection from tornadoes, though, so that may have been beneficial. We passed on the house. Ironically, everything else about the house was exceptionally flimsy (no walls reached the vaulted ceilings). Maybe skimping on walls provided just enough extra cash to construct the massive, reinforced concrete shelter.

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