Sunset shot on Maui, shutter speed at 1/100,000 (click for larger pic)

CHDK.  If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a pretty neat thing.  Go ahead, read about it on the link above.  I’ll wait.

Back?  OK, great.  so the summary: the CHDK project allows programmers with more time than I have to hack in to the camera’s firmware and setup your own environment.  for example, you can override the shutter speed, like I did in the photo to the right.  That’s a late-afternoon shot, directly at the sun from a beach in Maui.

The main reason I use CHD is so that I can get RAW images out of the sd500.  The JPG versions are excellent, but RAW give me some flexibility.

For example, in this pic: the photo directly out of the camera is definately on the dark side.  A little bit of the details have been lost in shadows.  To resurrect?  Well, with RAW, I can nudge up the exposure, lighten the midtones, and bring back down the shadows.  The result: more detail, still keeping the dark overall feeling.

This pic makes me think of old pinhole shots, the kind that required an incredible amount of light to make a photo.