The newest camera guide book coming from White Knight Press is Photographer’s Guide to the Canon PowerShot S110. The book is now in its final editing stage and should be published before the end of June. In this post I’m going to include a video from the camera so readers of the book (and others) will be able to see how the camera handles a particular video task.

The PowerShot S110 is a sophisticated camera, especially for its very compact size, and it has numerous shooting modes. One of those modes, called Creative Filters, includes several interesting and useful effects. In this case, I used the Miniature Effect setting, which simulates shooting tabletop miniature models by blurring edges of the image while leaving a central area in sharp focus. You may have seen this effect used in television commercials or as a special effect on a reality show, where the producers show a speeded-up street scene with lots of people and traffic that looks as if it were filmed on a miniature set.

The book contains a still-image example of the Miniature Effect setting, but this setting is probably more often used for movies, so I am including a video example here. I took the PowerShot S110 to the Dominion Riverrock festival in Richmond, Virginia, on May 17, 2013, to take various shots. I saw some people practicing for the Stand Up Paddleboard event, and I took the opportunity to film a short segment of that action using the Miniature Effect setting. Whenever that setting is used for a movie, the PowerShot S110 speeds up the action and records the video with no sound. Here is the video, as posted at YouTube:

As I noted above, I have usually seen this effect used for street scenes, and I’m not sure how well it works for this water action, because it may not look as much like a model as a street scene would. Anyway, I always enjoy using the “creative” settings on the cameras I write about, and the Miniature Effect setting is one of the more interesting ones to play around with.