Pocket Cameras

If you're looking for a small digital camera to do some in-flight photos with you might be a little frustrated like me by the current offerings out there. My two basic requirements, a wide angle lens and a remote, seem to be rather rare specs to find in one camera unfortunately. I was hoping that the new Canon G9 lens would get bumped towards the wide end of the spectrum but alas it didn't and Canon is still not including a remote option in their newer cameras. So it seems that the Canon S60 and S70, which were released a couple of years ago and now discontinued, still have the best compromise between picture quality and portability while having a relatively wide field of view and a remote. The S60 has been a great hang gliding companion for me over the last couple of years. I've taken most to the in-flight photos on this site with it. It's getting a bit long in the tooth technology wise I guess, but it's still working flawlessly and unless I give up on the remote option requirement or go to using my DSLR equipment (better call my insurance provider), I'll probably be hanging on to it a bit longer.

Got a camera you like to take hang gliding? Let us know, leave a comment.

Chris Culler with Mt Rainer - Canon S60

Hacking your Canon

Being a professional photographer, I thought I would try to create more posts here related to photography. Hopefully I can provide some useful info and make this site something more than just a home for my flight logs and snapshots. In the process maybe we'll get more hang gliding pilots inspired to take pictures and those that take pictures, inspired to create images.

So to start off here is a cool little tech tidbit for all you with Canon point and shoot cameras. Andre Gratchev has developed a firmware hack that will allow you to add some goodies to Canon digital cameras based on the Digi II chip. Gratchev's program, CHDK, adds some worthwhile features including:

• Shooting in RAW format
• Live histogram
• Zebra mode (blinking highlights and shadows)
• Depth Of Field (DOF) calculator
• Battery indicator
• Scripts execution
• File browser
• Text reader
• Calendar

If you're interested, there is an article by Nathan Willis on using CHDK.

Pretty cool, eh?

More Cloud Surfing

Another magical cloud surfing day at Rampart Ridge.

video 1 - 4mb
video 2 - 13mb