I bought the camera for the super zoom lens… and stayed for the wealth of creative features.

Now I wonder how I ever got along without a super zoom lens… 35 mm equivalent of 21 to 1365mm focal length on my Canon SX60 HS… a whopping 65X range! Wish I’d had this camera on some of my earlier travels. I’d have come back with fantastic photos of those Toucans in Trinidad, those howler monkeys on Barro Colorado, and that moose at Batchawana Bay in northern Ontario.

And even at home in the urban forest an ultra-telephoto lens makes it possible to capture the unreachable fruits of an Ohio Buckeye or the multiple chimneys of a 19th century building.

Treetops to rooftops… it’s all the same to the SX60 HS

And how about these super shots, unretouched except for cropping, brightness and contrast. I’ve never used any camera, including those with the largest sensor, where the photos didn’t benefit by a little cropping and adjustment of brightness & contrast.

Unretouched except for brightness and contrast.

My journey with photography actually started with a b&w roll-film Brownie Holiday when I was a kid. In university I was able to buy one of the ancestors of today’s digital single lens reflex cameras, the Asahi Pentax 35 mm SLR. The Pentax was the first SLR with a fixed pentaprism, and it was wonderfully versatile. A senior colleague of mine to whom I showed it exclaimed, “Wizard camera.” Before long I actually had an accessory lens, a macro lens you could swap out for the 50mm standard.

Along the way I used other 35 mm SLRs from Praktica and Nikon. The Praktica was a solid camera, so solid you could actually feel the thing vibrate when the mirror flapped up to expose the film surface to the image. No idea how I ever made a sharp image with that one.

Then came digital cameras, and I tried out the Nikon Coolpix 800 with an underwhelming 2.11 megapixel sensor and a 2x zoom lens. That one was small and light. And it had no shutter vibration at all. My later Canon digital-SLRs with an APS-C sensor had mostly solved the shutter vibration problem with damping, although you were still advised to lock the mirror up before taking a landscape photo on a tripod. I acquired a briefcase full of lenses… telephoto, zoom, wide angle, and macro. They took great pictures, but carrying the full kit around… oh my aching back.

I’ve been a pixel peeper at times and certainly got caught up in the competitive race between DSLR brands for higher resolution sensors and faster ISO speeds. But eventually I became tired of spending more and more money on improved hardware every year or two and especially of carrying all that weight around. I usually owned two DSLR bodies, each with a different lens attached because by the time I changed lenses the wildlife I was shooting had flown away. Opportunity lost! And then there was the ever present anxiety about getting dust on the sensor while the lens was off, possibly necessitating a trip to the camera repair shop,

Eventually I realized it. I’ll never be shooting to put an image up high, spread across a 20 foot wide billboard! So who needs all those pixels?

Now I’ve discovered what I really love about photography, and it is not an obsession with acquiring the ultimate in technical perfection. What I value these days is the creative freedom to just make pictures of whatever I want, and everything that makes getting that shot pleasant and easy. For me it’s all about dropping the anxiety about taking photos and getting the shot when the opportunity happens, instead of regretting I wasn’t ready.

And that’s why I love my Canon SX60 HS. I only need to carry one camera and I can frame the shot the way I want… from a nervous squirrel thirty feet away at one moment to a close-up insect the next.

Unusual red color morph of the Eastern Grey Squirrel (left); Bembix wasp (right).

From the wide sweep of an urban woodland to the delicate beauty of a flower in a park garden. Imaging without limit.

Beyond the photographic art, this camera also offers a rich selection of creative tools to broaden my ability to communicate with images. I’m only starting to explore these but will share here just one for now, a fish-eye lens effect.

Wood sculpture (left); in-camera SX60 HS fisheye effect (right) .

I would be remiss in closing without mentioning my two favorite software companions for the Canon SX60 HS. This camera’s pictures are great, but (like any camera) not so great that some can’t be improved by pairing with either or both of Corel Paintshop Pro and Topaz Photo AI. I’ll be talking more about them in future posts.