I have been working on my next book, which is a guide to the Canon PowerShot S110. A couple of days ago I took my S110 to a festival at the James River in Richmond, Virginia, to try out some of its various modes. I especially wanted to see how this very portable camera would do with a burst of action shots. The festival,  called Dominion Riverrock, had several areas with good material for action shots, so I had plenty of opportunities.

I  tried a few shots using regular continuous shooting, which is available through the camera’s Function menu. That option lets you use the advanced shooting modes, such as Program, Aperture Priority, and Shutter Priority and the highest-quality image size and format, including Raw, but the problem with that setting is that the speed of continuous shooting is limited to about 2 frames per second.

So I switched the camera to the SCN position on the mode dial, for Scene mode. One of the sub-options for that mode of shooting is called High-Speed Burst HQ (high quality). With Scene mode, you cannot use Raw image quality, but you can still shoot images at their full resolution. The big advantage of this Scene mode setting is that the burst is shot at up to 10 frames per second, depending on conditions. (For example, if the light is dim and the shutter speed slows down, the burst rate will decrease.)

I stationed myself beside the bike ramps while the freestyle bike riders were running through some practice jumps, and I had lots of opportunities to capture them as they jumped between the ramps.  The gallery of images below is from one burst. I held down the shutter button and managed to capture 8 images within about one second. Each shot was made at f/2.5 for 1/1250 second, with the camera using ISO 80. (ISO is set to Auto in this shooting mode and cannot be changed.) Image size was set to Large, and the aspect ratio to 4:3, so the image resolution as captured by the camera was 4000 by 3000 pixels, or about 12 megapixels.

In my opinion, the PowerShot S110 did an excellent job of stopping the action with high-quality images, so I think this burst mode was aptly named.