Every time I get a new compact camera (and there have been quite a few) I come onto my blog and talk about it. Just under a year ago I got the Canon Powershot G5X MkII to replace my G7X MkII and took it on a family holiday to Venice. Earlier this month we were back in the same city with the same camera but this time the vacation was all about art. The Venice Biennale and all of the fringe shows that happen across the city are great places to see a lot of good, bad and occasionally indifferent art and, for a photographer, it’s a great place to see people interacting with it.

To save you going back and reading last year’s post I swapped from the G7X MkII for three basic reasons:

• Slightly longer reach at the telephoto end of the zoom – a 120mm equivalent compared to the older camera’s 105mm equivalent
• The G5X MkII has a pop-up viewfinder which I use almost all of the time when I’m taking pictures that matter to me
• The G7X MkII needed to go in for a repair because the lens cover iris was (and still is) broken

When we are on holiday my wife loves to shoot nice pictures on her iPhone and so I encourage her to do most of the holiday photos and the recording of where we have been, what we saw and what we ate. I get to concentrate on taking pictures that I want to take and this holiday that was mostly about art lovers and the art that they came to see – not just at the Biennale but at galleries across Venice that we visited.

Taking pictures in low light (which is what most gallery shows have) is tough on a compact with the smaller chips and so going beyond 1600 ISO becomes almost impossible and the need for careful application of noise reduction becomes much more important. The AI Denoise in Adobe Camera RAW is good but slow and so I have been working with the ordinary noise reduction option within the same programme. I have written before about trialling the various noise reduction applications and, for all sorts of reasons, have been using the Photoshop options exclusively on work pictures all year. On this trip I didn’t take a laptop and so I edited as I went on my iPad Mini which has really good noise reduction options in the Lightroom app.

Having the pop-up viewfinder is incredibly helpful when you are shooting in bright light but I find it the better option almost all of the time. I only use the rear screen as a viewfinder when I need to tilt it to shoot at height of very low angles. In fact, if someone offered me a shiny new compact tomorrow with all sorts of great features but one that lacked a proper viewfinder I think that I’d have to decline.

Being on holiday with a decent camera that fits easily into a pocket is actually pretty relaxing. It weighs very little and even the two spare batteries that I need to carry when out for a whole day don’t require any extra bags. The image quality and file size isn’t what I’d get from an R6 MkII or an R5 MKII but that’s OK. What I do get is a menu system that feels familiar and great RAW files that fit with my regular workflows.

Over the eleven and a half months that I have owned this camera I have become used to it and have developed the odd niggle with it too.

My main issue is the imprecise process that you have to select focusing points when using the pop-up viewfinder. The only method I can see if to drag your thumb across the rear screen and that’s tough to do when your eye is against the viewfinder itself. I’d like the MkIII version (if we ever get that far) to have a small joystick in the same way that the more advanced mirrorless cameras do or something else that allows more precise focusing point selection.

The only other real gripe is the staged zoom with no way to select a focal length in between 24mm or 28mm and so on. The one that really got me on this holiday was having nothing between 50mm and 85mm which regularly meant shooting at the 50 setting and having to crop slightly in spaces where I couldn’t ‘zoom with my feet‘.

So, to sum up, I still really like this camera and I didn’t regret taking any of my mirrorless EOS kits. I can’t see myself swapping it out for anything else right now and so I expect it to accompany me wherever I go without one of my work cameras for some time to come.

Now for a few more images…