Quite often I find myself taking pictures with one of my trusty little compact point & shoot cameras. They are truly great for street photography and candid photography. While I love the simplicity of the Leica D-Lux3, along with its fast and razor-sharp f2.8 lens, I have also come to loath the limitations of its rather noisy CCD sensor. These days you are  much better equipped with a Canon S95. It features an ever so slightly faster f2 lens, much quieter sensor and retains all of the manual functionality one could possibly ask for by simply turning a metal ring fitted around the lens. It is also one of the slimmed and most robust cameras you’ll ever truly enjoy using.

Unlike large dSLR cameras compact cameras are, by their very nature, much less intrusive when capturing scenes of people in all kinds of random situations. Pull out a professional looking camera and people will become very shy and even annoyed, turn away their heads and, thus, ruin what could have been a perfectly nice composition before you’ve even had time to press the shutter release. However, what is most important of all to bear in mind, regardless of whether you’re taking pictures with a compact or larger type of camera, any scene will look unnatural and frozen in time, if you select a fast shutter speed. Pay careful attention to the speed at which your main subject and general surrounding is moving. In the above picture the elderly couple were near motionless, while the two Giants circling around them moved with considerable haste. I chose to take this particular handheld picture using 1/8th sec in order to simulate as much raw motion as possible and by doing so leaving the viewer with a sense of uncertainty as to what might happen next. If only it hadn’t been for the Leica D-Lux3′s noisy sensor. Then again, it was the dead of night with good light sources few and far between.

Happy snapping!