They Know What They’re Doing!

Auto setting

Underwater setting

Right off I’ll say that I know little about how digital cameras work, but I do know that I love them. First, they allow you to take many many pictures to try to get one really good one. Doing that with a regular camera would just be waaay too expensive in development costs. Second, they’re clever. Although I can set my digital camera manually, usually I’m not out for artistic shots, but rather, something easy and nice that prompts my memory of the day. Shooting underwater while snorkeling is complicated by movement—getting to my subject, then trying to stay still while I take the picture—not to mention losing color perception with depth. Frankly, I have neither the time nor the lung capacity to fiddle much with the camera while I’m trying to get a shots. Anyway, my second time out with my underwater camera, I took a couple of uninspired shots: washed out and too blue. Then I realized that I didn’t have the camera on the underwater setting. I changed it and—presto!—the pictures actually looked like what I was seeing, with the right colors. So at least those engineers at Canon know what they’re doing, even if I don’t.