Ken Rockwell is a prolific photography blogger, writing every day about various things including detailed equipment reviews and insight into the science and art of photography. Once again I've got sucked into reading a bunch of his writing about various topics.

Most of the technical detail is listed from a single page, which includes a lot of interesting detail, including the camera adjustments he normally uses (typically -2/3rd stop exposure compensation, and "vivid" colours). On my Canon IXUS 80, these settings can be accessed via:

  • In still photography mode

  • Press Func/Set to get to menu of shot options

  • Advance (right button) to manual exposure settings (cf, default of Auto)

  • Scroll down to exposure compensation and set to -2/3 (two to left)

  • Scroll down to colour settings (looks a bit like a paint tube) and advance to "vivid"

Amongst the other option in those menus is a "digital macro" mode (which due to the small sensor size can get fairly close in), and metering modes (evalulative, centre weighted average, spot), as well as white balance options. While I've typically always used AWB (which generally does a reasonable job), experimenting with some of the white balance options -- especially the custom white balance gives some interesting results under the compact fluroescent lights in my living room. Like Ken Rockwell I prefer to get the photo that I want in the camera, and avoid spending much time on post processing.

I also discovered a few shortcuts while experimenting with this, including that in playback mode, when zoomed into the image review (with zoom ring) it is possible to:

  • Return directly to unzoomed with the "Menu" button

  • Use "Set" button to change between scrolling around around zoomed in image and swapping between images

Other interesting pages on Ken Rockwell's site:

I expect eventually I'll have read everything of use to me on his site and "caught up", but I'm still in the absorbing phase at present.