This was my first outing in the cold with the pocketable Canon S90, arguably the best (matter of opinion of course) compact camera currently available. A compact camera in my opinion must be sleek enough to not only fit in the front pocket of a pair of jeans, but also slide easily into that pocket. To do this it must have a retractable lens. It also has to be light enough to be barely noticeable. A camera of under 7 ounces will do the trick.In spite of the sun on this day, the base temperature at the mountain was about 15F. We saw no thermometers at the top of the mountain, and maybe this was a good thing.
I kept the camera in an outside pocket of my jacket so that it would be cool enough not to fog up when using, yet warm enough not to freeze. To be honest, any compact could probably have done as well with the images. With such bright sun I was able to shoot at ISO 80, and ISO where small-sensored cameras will do just fine when the sun is behind your back.
Basically I shot large, high quality JPEGs in "P" mode, which is a mode that allows the camera to pick both the shutter speed and aperature. I used Auto White Balance, and Auto ISO (though there was enough light so the camera always chose ISO 80). After each shot I confirmed my exposure with the histogram, then used the camera's unique front dial to make any EV compensation adjustments should I feel a follow-up shot was necessary to get the exposure right. This was the best I could do, because with such bright light it was next to impossible to see the LCD in spite of its 3" viewing area with 461,000 dots.
The auto white balance resulted in a bit too much blue, so I added some amber in post-processing with Lightroom. But snow does funky things with white balance and exposure. Next time I might try the snow scene mode and see how that does. The snow scene mode adds a bit more exposure,which is important in snow scenes to compensate for the light meters tendency to reduce white snow to medium grey tones. The scene mode also helps with the white balance problems created by snow.
Other than that, I cropped most of these in Lightroom as it was very hard in the bright light to properly compose the pictures in-camera, especially since I was wearing polarized ski goggles! That's Mt. Lafayette in the background in the 1st, 3rd and 5th images.
I have 19 pictures posted on the Web site, which can be accessed with this link:
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