I started the evening switching to the Powershot’s “Slide Film” color mode, but that didn’t feel like the right choice, so I switched to “Black and White” mode, cranked the ISO as high as it would go (1600) and set Aperture to f4 and let the camera figure out the exposure time.
In the shade, exposure was fine, but going out into the bright clearly overtaxed the speed this shutter can do and much gets blown out. I just kinda rolled with it though, shooting a few exposures to see where that might look good. Not being able to chimp means you just try it out and see what happens. Not like I’m burning film or anything.
Ok, let’s squeeze down to f8 aperture and get some of that tone back into the sky. You get an idea of the contrast in the EVF, but it’s a rough approximation of what the camera will actually record.
And as the evening sinks into night, I set the Powershot out on the railing and made a bunch of exposures as cars came by and the sun sank below the mountains. The old hospital at a very Dutch angle with the camera’s sensor struggling to suck light at its highest, noisiest ISO and the lens stopped all the way down took on a very 16mm B&W film look. That meant an animated GIF, of course, as I wave my Ghost Wizard Wand and enchant the lights on at the hospital, crash-zooming in just in time to catch the big floodlight kick on! Sweet – all I needed at that point was Bigfoot to stroll by as I eased the zoom back in, but that cryptid was un-cooperative and remained elusive to my enchantments. :D
Since I believe in Warhol’s theory of factory production of art, I made the beep-boop add some contrast to my image series, resize them by a quarter and then string them all together into an animated gif with 2 easy commands:
for file in *.JPG; do convert -brightness-contrast 11×22 -resize 25% $file $file; done
convert -delay 20 -loop 0 *.JPG animated.gif
The values? Eh, I could test them in Photoshop and see the result before committing to overwrite my originals, but YOLO – let’s enhance that Mexican Jumping Bean grain with 11% brightness and 22% contrast!
Heh, interesting result. The animated series at high contrast does show up a line of dead pixels running vertically through the center of the sensor, a fainter one to the left and one to the farthest left side. Not really noticeable in stills, but at these extremes it shows. It kind of adds to the scratchy 16mm vibe, tho. I guess you can’t expect *absolute* perfection in a camera that cost $24 and is nearly 20 years old, but you can certainly get something interesting. (: