Photographer’s Hacked Classic Digital Level-and-Shoot Digicam Is Surprisingly Superior

Photographer and artist Red remodeled the 15-year-old Canon PowerShot A490 compact digicam into an impressively succesful digicam. The digicam, which launched in 2010 for simply over $100, delivers surprisingly good picture high quality, not less than after a little bit of hacking.

Red shared his hacked digicam on Reddit earlier this week, showcasing the digicam’s spectacular RAW picture high quality.

“I hacked an old Canon point and shoot from 2010 to shoot RAW and I’m blown away by the results,” Red wrote on Reddit.

The Canon PowerShot A490 has a small Type 1/2.3 CCD sensor paired with a built-in 37-122mm (equal) f/3-5.8 lens. The $100 compact digicam lacks many options out of the field, together with the flexibility to seize RAW pictures — it solely helps JPEG. At least earlier than a little bit of tinkering.

“I used CHDK, which stands for Canon Hack Development Kit,” Red tells PetaPixel over electronic mail. “CHDK is a firmware hack that enables more control of your camera including things like custom scripts and importantly the ability to shoot in RAW with cameras that never had the ability to out of the box.”

The photographer says there are “many ways” to get CHDK onto a appropriate Canon PowerShot digicam, however he opted to make use of a free software known as CHIMP.

“All you do is format your SD card of choice, take one picture with the camera you wanna hack and load it to that SD card and throw it in a reader connected to your PC and run CHIMP,” Red explains. “CHIMP will then use that picture to identify things like firmware version and camera model to automatically download the correct version of CHDK for your camera to the SD card! Then all you have to do is insert the card into the camera with the write protection lock set to ‘on,’ and boom! You now have a hacked camera!”

Red says he purchased the digicam only a few days earlier than posting to Reddit and hacked it the very first night time after buying it from the proprietor of the movie lab he makes use of.

“Shout out to Todd of Main St Photo for the great deal,” Red provides.

“I had little experience with this camera and in fact it was my first compact ‘digi’ cam, but I did have extensive experience using a hacked bridge point-and-shoot camera called the Canon SX40 HS, and it was a similar process to hacking using CHDK,” Red explains.

“This camera far exceeded my expectations once I was able to shoot RAW, especially wildlife photos since the camera has a crazy amount of zoom!”

The A490 performs in depth in-camera processing on JPEGs, which can lead to photographs with default settings having a very digital look, particularly in difficult or low-light conditions.

However, the RAW information, which open simply in RAW photograph modifying software program like Lightroom, require solely a little bit of denoising however in any other case supply a powerful quantity of flexibility for such a compact digicam. Red additionally notes that the pictures want some lens corrections, that are in any other case baked into the JPEG photographs.

“The great thing about the RAW files is that they’re like a ‘digital’ negative, an unaltered pure representation of what the sensor sees, and that gives you the ability to tweak the results much farther than you would be able to with the already compressed and processed JPG,” Red says. “You’re able to get the absolute best the camera can give you.”

While RAW information not often look nice proper out of the digicam, particularly with one thing just like the A490, Red says he loves the artistic management and strategy of modifying pictures.

“It’s the process and journey to the end result that I love,” the photographer explains, which is an enormous a part of why additionally they love analog pictures.

“For me, there’s nothing like getting beautiful results out of hardware where the expectations are so low,” Red continues. “It reminds me of a quote I heard once, ‘the amazing thing about the dancing bear isn’t how well it dances, but that it dances at all.’ For me, the amazing thing about photography is getting something beautiful regardless of the limitations of the tools that you use, and I think that’s far more satisfying to get good pictures out of a bad camera than good pictures out of a great camera!”

Red admits he’s nonetheless new to pictures, however he’s having a blast as he learns the ropes.

“Photography in general is very new to me! I started around May of this year and just became hyper fixated and dove headfirst into the hobby,” Red explains. They have acquired a number of immediate cameras, together with the Polaroid Go, Instax Mini Evo, and even a Polaroid SX-70, up to now. Gear acquisition syndrome units in quick.

These cameras obtained Red into watching immediate pictures channels like In An Instant and Just Another Chris, which fueled the eagerness even additional.

“I fell in love with working around the limitations of instant film and working to get great shots. I started to fall in love with the process of photography itself,” says Red.

Photography arrived none too quickly for Red.

“The beginning of this year was rough for me and mentally I feel very much like I was disassociating a lot. I’d get up, eat, go to work, go to bed, and repeat. Constantly going through the motions and not really being present mentally in the moment at all. Like, I was there but I wasn’t ‘there,’ so to speak, almost feeling like a machine doing the motions it was programmed for while I helplessly watched depression slowly take away my motivation to do anything else,” Red remembers.

“Getting into photography was huge for my overall mental health and wellbeing. It got me out of the house, it let me focus on the beauty of little things and capture the world and things I liked as I saw them and that let me slow down and generally feel more human in a way. I was no longer a robot just going through the motions, I now had something to do that I loved doing, and that definitely grounded me a lot more and let me focus on life and my surroundings.”

Photography is a improbable alternative for folks to specific themselves creatively and expertise the world round them. With reasonably priced point-and-shoot cameras and a little bit of hacking, folks can get into pictures with out breaking the financial institution, with out sacrificing the picture high quality or artistic potentialities which might be usually reserved for less than high-end, costly cameras. With some tinkering and persistence, even entry-level point-and-shoot cameras can produce some spectacular outcomes.

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Image credit: Red (@redscwerel)