A serious Ixus 50 workout at B-Movie: Nosferatu.

[reddragdiva]

'da Oly safely in place, I took the Ixus 50 for its first serious nightclub workout. Please inform me of missing names, because I managed to forget the names of most of the people I didn't know. If you are a victim of a drive-by shooting, please let me know (unless you're objecting to being a ten-pixel blurred face at the far end of a room shot, in which case, uh, no). Photo policy.

Initial findings:

1. I need to practice focus in near-dark.
2. Front-fill flash gives some amazing effects with a lightshow, carefully applied — typically a subdued flash and one second exposure. I'll be using it a lot, possibly with a tripod. Note that it seems to list front-fill flash in the EXIF data as "red eye flash."
3. The red-eye flash doesn't make a difference: you're going to get red-eye. I had to hand-correct so many of these shots.
4. In low light, it seems to drop colour information altogether. This is unexpected and may not be helpful to me.
5. Take a spare battery if you're going to take nearly a hundred shots with flash.
6. I so wish this camera had IS.

Good examples of point 1 are this floor shot and these girls. It's focusing, but certainly not anywhere I want it to. I've already discovered how to focus it off to one side before taking the shot, but it's annoying to have to do so. (wechsler points out that this is probably the AiAF, which uses a sophisticated nine-point focusing algorithm to accurately pick the wrong part of the photo to focus on almost every time, and which I will be leaving off next outing.)

Point 4 is of great interest to me in terms of pulling images out of the muck. See this one, which was pulled up out of the noise, but the camera appears to have applied noise reduction in such a way as to have dropped colour information where that would be noisy. This is not unreasonable (we're talking about what to do at the limits of the sensor's abilities), but is annoying as I've relied on pulling colour out of the noise in the past, e.g. this one, which is this one without the flash.

I got a PowerShot S110 (Ixus v) in the post yesterday morning. I might take that out and see how the older generation does; I've had nice results with an Ixus v2 in the past.