When my wife Karen and I built our house we decided not to build a pool. It seems not a year passes by in Houston without several children drowning in pools. With our son only two years old and the time and our daughter minus 4 months old when we moved in, we'd decided we just didn't want the risk.
Fast forward eight years and both kids look forward eagerly to Memorial Day when the neighborhood pools open and we can go swimming. In the early years I didn't have the means to capture the fun but two years ago I bought a waterproof housing for our old canon powershot s70 and now I had a camera that could shoot RAW images that could accompany us to the pool.
The challenge with the S70 is that the LCD on the back is only 1 3/4 inches on the diagonal and it's almost impossible to see in the sun. So this year, I went out and purchased a Canon waterproof case
You can still find some new and used G10's on the market but the new version is the G12
and it has its own waterproof case.
The G10 has an LCD that 3 inches on the diagonal so it's easier to see the screen, though like any LCD, it can be a struggle in bright sunlight. But the real benefit of the G10 over the S70 is the 14 megapixel RAW image over the megapixel RAW image. Of course, like any man, I didn't bother to read the manual before taking the combo to the pool. I just jumped in then found myself stumped. How do I change the aperture or shutter speed or both? I couldn't figure it so I just put the ISO on ‘auto'. Second time I picked a more reasonable combination of shutter speed (1/250) and aperture (f5.6) and again the ‘auto' ISO.[ad name=”post”]
I've now read the manual and learned what the ‘shortcut' button does – pressed in combination with the right and left buttons around the selection dial they allow you to change the shutter speed and aperture – now I know for the next time. As the saying goes, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again, and then if that still fails, read the manual”.
In addition to the shots of the kids having fun, I also ended up with some weird and wacky images, two of which are posted here. It's a different perspective, sitting under water and shooting up to the items on the surrounding land. The yellow-green image is one of the water slides through the surface ripples while the green-purple image was my daughter jumping in close to me. Both images have been brought into Photoshop
Playing around some more with some artistic filters, I added the ‘Ink Outlines' artistic filter to get the image below.
Summer has only just started and our pools are open through Labor Day so I sense plenty more opportunities to experiment further over the coming months.
