I bought this camera a few weeks ago and after a bit of playing i have to say i’m really pleased with it. It has a very impressive 14x optical zoom (35 mm equivalent: 28-392 mm) which can be extended even further digitally and it can shoot 720p HD movies. It’s very compact and so fits into your shirt or trouser pocket quite easily and feels very well built.

View on Amazon

You can view some of the pictures i’ve taken with this camera here – Flickr set: SX210 IS and here are 6 of my favourite pics i’ve taken with this camera:

Picture (1) was taken from Mow Cop Castle and the camera was set to it’s ‘Miniature’ scene mode. It’s a brilliant setting that enables the camera to take tilt-shift type pictures. These work best if you are quite high up shotting down on the scene such as photographing people or cars from quite high up. I found it works well on landscapes too from high up.

Picture (2) was taken at Ironbridge, i used Photoshop to convert the image to black and white to bring out the sky more. I’ve been to Ironbridge before with my big camera but found this compact more than up to the job (and a lot less hassle to carry).

Picture (3) was taken in our front garden and again i used the miniature setting and i stood on top of a bench to give me a better perspective. The camera is also set to vivid mode here to exaggerate the ‘toy town’ effect.

Picture (4) was taken in the back garden, i used the macro mode to capture this pink geranium. My only gripe with his camera really is that you can’t get closer than 5cm when in macro mode. I use macro quite a lot so that is something that i’m a bit disappointed about. (I can get much closer with my Lumix TZ7 and out of interest i have taken some photos of the same subjects with both cameras to show the differences which i will post later). That said i think the picture still looks really well!

Picture (5) was taken at Hodnet Hall Gardens. I put the camera into shutter priority mode so i could slow down the shutter speed enough to blur the waterfall. This was a handheld shot so i think the camera did quite well here.

Picture (6) was also taken at Hodnet Hall Gardens of the hall itself.

I think this is a very versatile camera especially with the manual, aperture priority and shutter priority modes. The scene modes are very useful (especially miniature!) and the auto mode is very accurate when choosing the right settings for you. The colours don’t always seem as accurate as my Lumix and i wish the macro mode was able to focus a little closer but other than that i’m extremely happy with this camera!

Got myself a fabulous Polaroid pogo a couple of weeks ago. £22 on Amazon, bit of a bargain that! The pictures aren’t as good as a normal photo printer that uses ink cartridges and the photos are 2×3” but the pictures are stickers and are really useful for sticking in your journal or on the fridge door! For that money i think it’s great :-)

Phew! Well after much tweakery pokery i have finally managed to organise my site a bit better. I’ve split it in two. One (www.magikpath.com) to use just to showcase my photography and this one (www.blog.magikpath.com) for me to use as a blog. It always felt untidy trying to show off my photo’s amongst my ramblings so i hope this will work better. :-)