$20 Digicam Street Photography in Chicago | Canon PowerShot SX230 HS

Check out my eBay store where I sell cameras: https://www.ebay.com/usr/midlandpictures

I drove to Chicago from Omaha in late November to celebrate a relative's birthday. On the way, I planned to stop in Des Moines to go camera thrifting. Ultimately I didn't find as much as I was hoping for, but one thrift store did have a digital camera that got me pretty excited.

One that I had never seen before...

It was the Canon PowerShot SX230 HS.

And they wanted $20 for it.

This camera caught my eye mainly because the LCD display is a 16x9 aspect ratio instead of the traditional square-ish shape. When I got to my destination in the Chicago area, I fiddled with the camera even more and was thrilled to see that it had full manual controls - ISO, aperture & shutter speed.

How? A little compact digicam with full manual controls???

It was as if my Canon PowerShot G11 and my Canon PowerShot A4000 IS had made sweet, sweet love and produced a little camera baby...

Not only did it have full manual controls, but it also had arguably my most favorite setting in a Canon digital camera - Positive Film.

Now you can only use this setting when shooting JPG and, fortunately, the SX230 can't shoot RAW so I was forced to shoot Positive Film with this little camera.

A let me tell ya... I love me some Positive Film. So much so that I'm going to make another video with my G11 where I use JPG + Positive Film instead of what I normally use which is RAW with no presets.

I didn't shoot much video with this camera, but I'm curious to try. I will say that shooting a full day on this camera was a real delight even in the absence of an optical viewfinder. I always made sure to protect my highlights and doing so made editing the JPGs much more pleasurable. In high dynamic range situations I had no choice but to protect highlights as much as I could and full manual controls made that very easy.

I will say that I am a bit disappointed with what I saw (or didn't see for that matter) while shooting street in Chicago. It was unusually cold for late November so everyone was booking it to cars, trains or buildings so there wasn't a lot of opportunity for any kind of drama or interesting moments on the street. I didn't let it affect my objectivity while I walked around, but when reflecting on the hour+ train ride home, it was hard to ignore that I had higher expectations for such a huge city.

If you have any more questions, hit me up in the comments!

LINKS:

Canon PowerShot SX230 HS 👉 https://bit.ly/3HhXjF1
FilmConvert Nitrate 👉 https://geni.us/FCNitrate
Save 10% with MIDLAND
RNI Films 👉 https://reallyniceimages.com
AIVA 👉 https://www.aiva.ai

Video filmed with the Canon EOS R + Canon 17-35mm f/2.8 L USM Lens

Check out my newest photography channel where I clean & test digital and film cameras ASMR-style 👉 ‪@ApertureZeero‬

#canon #digicam #streetphotography