June's Camera

When I visited Florida in early March for my stepmother's memorial, my stepsister and brother-in-law gave me her camera, a Canon SX70 HS. It's a lightweight, easy-to-use point-and-shoot with a built-in zoom and some other features. As it turns out, the timing was good, because I'd been thinking about buying a so called "bridge camera" to have a lightweight alternative to my big DSLR.

Yesterday I took June's camera out for a trial run. I'd never used it before and I wanted to see what kind of pictures it would take. I walked to Gladstone Park, on the other side of Cricklewood, shooting images along the way.

The photo above I took just steps from our flat, on West End Green. That guy was putting some kind of coating on the bronze plaque that commemorates the planting of that tree in 1902 for the coronation of King Edward VII. He'd brush it on and then heat it with a blowtorch (hence the gas bottle next to him). I asked him about it, and he said it's called "patination" -- it restores the bronze coloring so the plaque doesn't entirely oxidize and become green.

I wanted to try the camera in various situations. This was my test to see how it handles close-ups. I saw this brick with an interesting manufacturer's mark, only belatedly realizing there's a little ladybird (ladybug) on the left-hand side!

I shot all these pictures on auto, so I wasn't experimenting too much with settings. There is a manual option so I could use that if I wanted. The camera has a fold-out screen on the back, so I could frame my shot using that or by holding it up to my eye. I tried both methods.

Look at those beautiful doors! Can you imagine how great they must look from the inside, with sun coming through that stained glass?

Again, the camera seems to handle close-ups well. Canon introduced this model in September 2018 so it's not very old, and it wasn't particularly cheap. (My stepmother, who traveled the world, would not have a cheap camera!)

It handles street photography pretty well, though there's a bit of lag between snapping the photo and being ready to take the next one. It's not as rapid-fire as my big Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

It does landscapes nicely too. Here's a wood in Gladstone Park full of blooming wild garlic, also known as ramsons, with some bluebells in the back.

On the way home, I stopped in at a Costa in Cricklewood and had coffee sitting in the window, looking out on this scene, which I shot with my phone:

Interesting that there are two "casinos" right across from each other! Always being ripped off by The Man. The phone picture is smaller than the camera shots, about 2 MB compared to 6.5 MB -- so June's camera does indeed appear to capture more information than a phone.

WHOA! What is this?! I didn't take this picture, obviously, but it came along with the others when I downloaded the images. Then I remembered my brother-in-law saying he took the camera to Lettuce Lake Park in Tampa to try it out himself -- he still had the date stamp turned on, so you can see that photo was taken Feb. 28, a few weeks after June died. There were a few other odds and ends on the memory card as well.

My verdict is that I'm pretty pleased with the camera. I think it will serve me well when I don't want to carry my big DSLR, which weighs 3.5 pounds with my lightest lens (and I'm usually carrying a camera bag containing two other lenses as well, weighing several more pounds). This camera is light enough to put in a jacket pocket. What a relief!