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?