I’m here in Southwest Utah for the next several days and just before coming out I picked up the grand new Canon PowerShot G11.  (I was on the waiting list at Calumet.)  Now I’m actually getting a chance to use it and find out jus what this camera can do.

I didn’t do any research, no product comparison, didn’t even check the published or anticipated specs.  When Canon announced it I put my name on the list.  The only thing I cared about was that its predecessors had rave reviews from photographer friends of mine (some of them even dedicated Nikon people) and the fact that it shoots RAW.  So everything about this camera was new to me and I didn’t know it yet but I was in for some surprises.

When I picked the camera in the store the sales people hadn’t seen one yet so we had to take it out of the box, pop in the battery and play with it just a little.  The first cool thing we noticed was that the LCD swung out and rotated.  And the mode dial provided controls over both the shooting mode and ISO.  The latter has a whopping range from a low of 80 to a high of 3200.  I don’t shoot high ISO very often but was delighted with the 80.  The camera modes have all the manual and semi-automatic modes I like – M, Av, Tv and P.  The fully automatic modes include the usual AUTO which lets the camera make ALL the decisions.  I’m actually going to try that out today.  There’s also the SCN mode that lets you choose things like portrait, landscape, macro, fireworks, sunset, beach, snow, … the list goes on.  A couple of modes surprised me like low light (as in shooting by candle light as in shooting your daughter in a dark room blowing out her birthday candles).  The other was quick shoot (not entirely sure how I would use that).  And finally, movie mode.

Being a professional nature photographer exposure compensation is a feature that is really important to me.  I was expecting to have to access it by diving into the menus like some of Canon’s lower end dSLR models.  But sitting on top of the camera is an exposure compensation knob.  Well, that made my  day.

Hey, I gotta run.  The sun is not waiting for me to go on and on here.  Catch you later.  And I promise I’ll have pictures.