After having put away my S5i since getting a K100D in December, I recently pulled it out again to see what that little thing is really capable of. I've wanted to do some street photography without carrying around a big DSLR that advertises "Photographer!" to the world, but seeing how a Leica M is a little out of my price range I wanted to see if a little P&S was up to the task.
I've managed to outfit my little S5i fairly well actually. It's a pretty straightforward way of getting shots you really couldn't with a DSLR, so I thought there might be others out there who would want to try it.
I'm sticking with black and white for this, so noise isn't as big a concern. Therefore, I set the ISO to 400 and went down to -1 EV, essentially "pushing" one stop to ISO 800 in PP. Noisy for sure, but I actually like the result. This lets me take photos without a flash in fairly dim conditions. Since there is no mirror slap, you can use fairly slow shutter speeds, even without SR. I also turned off all sounds, deactivated the auto-shutoff so it's always at the ready, and turned off the LCD to save power and make it less conspicuous (i.e., I'm not holding it at arms reach in front of me).
To take a shot I just put the viewfinder to my eye to frame the shot and snap away. It's also very easy to take shots at chest level if the perfect moment presents itself. After a while it's pretty easy to judge what will be in the frame. I haven't had any really good "true" street shots so far (thanks to a combination of bad weather and my own nervousness), but here is one I snapped while hanging around at home:
04-24-2007, 07:10 PM
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