Another thing we found while packing up our old place was Christine’s ultracompact digicam from 2014, the Canon PowerShot ELPH 340 HS, aka IXUS 265 HS in other markets. Here are a couple of shots I took on my way back from work today, all unedited and straight out of the camera.
The story of how Christine came into possession of this camera that we’d all but forgotten about is pretty cool; in the months before she figured out how she was going to pull off packing up and moving all the way to join me in Lebanon—itself a minor miracle and a story for another day—she had bought a fancy mattress for a bargain. And when that day eventually came, she had to offload it quickly before uprooting herself halfway across the globe. So she listed it on Craigslist, and someone offered more than she’d originally paid for it, giving her a neat profit that she used to buy this camera at Best Buy. She figured she’d need one in Lebanon. She ended up using it to report on relief efforts among Syrian refugees at her job there, but that was about it. Our phones outpaced the convenience of an ultracompact digicam. And we both forgot all about it.
What I love about this camera—and Canonheads might start furiously nodding at this—is how interoperable it still is, a whole decade after its release. It has a wifi feature that I was sure was defunct by now, just like the Panasonic camcorder we got at work during the pandemic—wifi enabled but used a platform that didn’t exist anymore—but to my surprise, the Canon CameraConnect app still supports it. It only took a couple of taps to transfer these photos wirelessly. Given how planned obsolescence is baked into everything we own these days, that’s pretty impressive.
I also love that, for whatever reason, my phone decided that this camera is called “Pete.” That’s what it says when you connect the two. Pete’s a good name for a camera, I think. Simple, dependable, trustworthy.
Do your cameras have names?
A voice in the back of my head nags me every time I walk through these streets, and it gets louder when I have a camera in my hand, telling me someone’s going to see something and say something at some point, causing me grief for being there, and I’m not sure these snaps would be worth the headache.
But, lucky for me, these streets are mostly devoid of residents; the only people I see day in and day out are the contractors and the maids — the proletariat manicuring the lawns and keeping those picket fences white. And they couldn’t care less about me, thanks be to God.
I’ve found myself enjoying taking verticals and detail shots with this tiny camera; it’s 2/3s the size of my phone. It also has really nice lens flares.
All of these photos were taken at ISO 100. I’ve been alternating between auto exposure and using EV compensation, because I sometimes like the way this blows out the highlights.
This Canon PowerShot also has rudimentary “color profiles” that I haven’t looked into fully just yet; they look customizable. Is that common for all Canons? As one of those X-Series “fauxtographers” that meme-makers love to hate, I’d assumed Fujifilm was the first to do that.
The Canon ‘My Colors’ color profile I used in these photos is called ‘Positive Film,’ which, according to the menu tool tip, lets you “recreate the vivid colors of shooting with film.” I think you can best see that in the first slide, which I’m including straight out of the camera; there’s something very filmic about how that golden hour sun is rendered.
Swipe through to see other renderings, slightly edited. Bonus slides at the far end show you the 12x zoom capacity.