Photographing wildlife on an African game drive has a rhythm to it that is well known to anyone who has made such a trip.  With the possible exception of lions, giraffes, and elephants (who are generally quite unimpressed), when your vehicle arrives on the scene, the animals look up and check you out for about two seconds, and then turn and leave.  One friend who made an African trip some years ago claims to have the finest collection of animal butt photos in the known universe.

No camera can improve your timing, and this part of our story is another case of a missed shot that I asked my traveling companion with the Nikon D50 to send to me.  A row of vultures had lined up looking at us for the prescribed two seconds.  Canon PowerShot cameras focus by having the operator depress the shutter button slightly until a green light illuminates.  You then depress the button the rest of the way and take the picture.  If you are in a rush, it is easy to fully depress the button before the camera has a chance to focus.

When I received the replacement photo I nearly fell off my chair.  Unlike the previous giraffe example, in which the Canon adequately captured a somewhat distant scene, the vulture lineup photo is a crystal clear closeup view I could never have gotten with the PowerShot.

A second trip to Africa in the spring of 2008 was the impetus to semi-retire the S110.  We took it along for the security of having a backup camera, a luxury suggested by some of the near disasters averted by the wrist strap.  Being wowed by the Nikon SLR was still not enough for me to abandon the freedom provided by the PowerShot, even though I didn’t know how much improvement to expect from 12 million megapixels.  They certainly sounded impressive.

As previously explained, the additional pixels reveal themselves in the form of a much larger original image.  Where the S110 downloads a standard sized image of 8.9 x 6.7 inches at 180 pixels/inch, the SD950 image measures 22.2 x 16.7 inches at the same pixel count.  In the examples below, the detail panels that appear to be enlarged are actually at “full size” (in relation to the original images, which have been shrunk) and would only suffer some loss of resolution if expanded further.  As prints, either detail panel would measure about 4×7 inches.

There is little doubt that digital SLR cameras have also improved since the Nikon D50 was current, and that this PowerShot 3x zoom photo of elephants a quarter mile distant would be much sharper with that sort of equipment.  But the improvement over the S110 is quite satisfactory, and until I have another “vulture lineup” moment, I’ll continue to carry my camera in my pocket.

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