My first digicam was a Canon Powershot S100 purchased back in 2000, and it changed my perspective on photography. Being able to review images in real-time, for the first time, helped me improve as a photographer. 23 years later…

I’ve had only 3 other Canons – they’re remarkably durable. This one, a Powerahot Elph 115 HS, is over 10 years old and shoots wonderfully. With CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit, you can unlock manual controls, shoot in RAW format, and add features like a neutral density filter feature and exposure bracketing. With CHDK loaded onto an SD card (it doesn’t require any changes to your camera…) I feel like I’ve got manual controls in a camera that fits in a pants pocket.

I use it for street candid photography – the key is to either use infinity focus if it’s bright enough and lock the aperture to allow a wide depth of field with CHDK, or keep the shutter half-pressed with the focus locked around 8 feet away. The 2012 processor is more than adequate for my needs, although saving RAW+JPG does take a bit longer than shooting just jpg.

Even without CHDK, there’s a handful of filters and modes, including low-light flash, which does a long exposure with flash at the tail end to capture detail outside of the flash range, toy camera mode, portrait, burst mode, tilt-shift, and other modes, plus in-camera editing.

I remember when I bought this camera, being concerned about space constraints with a 512 mb SD card. I had several 16 gb microSD cards with adapters laying around, one of them gives me >9999 shots, according to the camera.