Time Immortal

This is another picture from the Christmas Day sledding. After a few runs down the tree-lined path, we moved to a hill a few hundred metres to the East, and kept on sledding there. If you’ve never tried to go down a hill on a baking pan or a big, metal bowl, O Reader, let me assure you that you’ve missed something…unique. It’s surprising how fast those metal bowls can go, especially.

This is one of Grace’s sisters coming to a rather…abrupt stop on the hill (hence the large amounts of flying snow). I had to wait a fair bit for this shot, and getting into position certainly kept me…cool (given that I was stretched out prone on the snow). As was the case with the previous picture, I just love the action in the shot — I think it makes the picture.

Edit-wise, I didn’t have to do as much to this shot, as I’d remembered to reduce the ISO setting on the camera by this point. I did have to do some highlight reduction, and I boosted the red and green saturations a bit (and the green luminance) to bring out some of the background details. Still, I’ve always been pleased with how well Canon cameras conduct themselves in outdoor conditions, and one of the great joys on my old PowerShot A70 was shooting outdoors in winter. The same holds true on the EOS 350D, I can assure you.

Today’s picture is actually a semi-redo of a shot I took over a year ago, while wandering through the downtown core of Edmonton. For comparison, here is the original picture.

That shot was taken on my 3.2 megapixel Canon PowerShot A70, and to be fair it’s not a bad shot for a compact camera. The digital noise is more apparent on the older sensor (which is using Canon’s DiGIC processor, not the Rebel XT’s DiGIC 2), and obviously the resolution is lower.

Here’s the shot off of the new camera, and the actual picture for today.

Where was this taken?

It’s hard to produce an exact replica of the original shot, simply because the camera lenses behave in different ways and it’s almost impossible to set the exact same level of zoom. And the lighting conditions are different as well — the Sun is in a different position in the sky in May than it is in October (and then a couple of hours later in the day, if memory serves).

Still, the shot comparison is instructive in showing what’s changed between the cameras. The overall content of the picture is the same, but the level of detail being recorded has gone up by multiples.

I’ve shot a few different cameras in my (relatively short, thus far) life, including a Canon AE-1 (35 mm film SLR), a Konica Revio Z2 (24 mm film APS point and shoot), and a Canon Powershot A70.

Where was this taken?

I’ve loved using all three cameras in their time, and I still keep them around because they are mementos to me. And every so often, I might pull one down off the shelf and use it again, just for old times’ sake.

In fact, I still have a roll of film in the Z2 which has been there for about 2 years. I should probably finish it off and get it developed.