Canon Ixus 40
Playing around with an old digicam.
If you have read my Photography journey series, you may remember that everything began with a small Canon Ixus 40 digicam back in 2006/2007.
You may also remember that many years later, somehow that same camera disappeared, and I felt a bit sorry about it, because it would have been nice to have it in my camera collection.
Well, earlier this year, I did something a bit crazy. I paid almost 90 euro for a second hand Canon Ixus 40 on eBay. Only to have it among my other cameras.
My daughter used it once for a school trip, but aside from that, it just stayed on the shelf. Until a few weeks ago.
I decided to bring the camera with me for a small walk around Florence to see what it was capable of. It is so incredibly small and handy that it would be the perfect everyday camera if only the image quality was decent.
I shot a couple of frames, but as soon as I emptied the card onto my computer, it was clear that the images were not good. Unsharp and very boring colours.
However, before deleting everything, I decided to play around with some film presets, and suddenly everything changed. I applied a Kodak Portra 400 preset and a Kodak T-Max 100 preset, and much to my surprise, the photos suddenly looked really nice. It seemed as though these images were made for film presets, and their lack of sharpness suddenly became an advantage. I decided to give the camera one more chance.
Since the image quality was already pretty low, I had to shoot at the highest possible resolution, and since I only had an old 16 MB (!) SD card for the camera, I decided to buy a new one of 2 GB, which is the maximum this camera can handle.
Shooting with the Canon Ixus 40 and simply applying a quick preset reminds me so much of the good old days when I had just discovered photography and played around with my images in iPhoto. It also reminds me of the first years with Instagram, when it was all about snapshots and filters.
So now I bring this little jewel with me every time I go out, and I really think it will inspire me to shoot more on a daily basis, capturing my everyday life and little things that inspire me throughout the day. Like a simple and unpretentious photo diary.
The black frames are just for fun - as is everything with this camera. But honestly, I think the photos look so much better than any photo I have ever taken with my iPhone 13 camera. I simply love the softness, which is impossible to get with the newer phone cameras.
I am even open to try and use the flash sometimes, and of course, if the light is really good I may even be able to make some decent photos without applying the presets. We’ll see!
Here are a few shots from the past ten days.
