Earlier this month I had the pleasure of taking a river cruise of sorts through Berlin… including both the former East and West parts.

I shot the photos with my new Canon SD700 camera (which I’m generally pleased but not thrilled with) and posted them on various services.

See my Berlin boat tour photos on...
- Flickr [ set | slideshow ] (strong community, many features, good privacy protection)
- Fotki [ set | slideshow not directly linkable ] (handy admin features, nice hierarchical options)
- Picasa Web Albums [ set | slideshow ] (smart pre-caching, great Picasa integration)

You may note a few funky/overly-general tags (e.g., “Places” and “Geography” and such).  This is because I’m having problems debugging a hierarchical-categories-to-IPTC-script.  If that doesn’t mean anything to you, no worries; it’s only a minor annoyance and doesn’t affect the photos themselves .

I did slight editing (brightness, contrast, cropping, etc.) using Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X (trial version; I’m a paid user of version 8… and God what awful URLs!!!) and organized/tagged the photos using the incomparable and very affordable software called IMatch by Photools.

My thoughts on my new Canon SD700 camera:
- Startup time is wonderfully fast.
- Very easy to use.
- Feels comfortable, solid in my hands.
- Outdoor photos are consistently good, even in lower light.
- Zoom is great, even with movies.
- Movies can be taken even in quite low light!
- Battery life is amazing!  I literally shot for hours a day always using the LCD, never once got a low battery warning!

But…
- The image stabilizer helps quite a bit, but still doesn’t allow for very-low-light photos.
- Photos—even at the highest quality setting—aren’t as sharp as I’d like.  This is my biggest complaint.
- Battery/SD card door feels flimsy.
- The damn thing is pricey (as “low” as $449 at reputable places).
- I still envy the much thinner/lighter ultra-compacts that my friends have (even though they don’t take near-as-nice photos).

* * *

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics, and I’d love your feedback and shoutouts and such either here in my blog comments and/or in the comments in the galleries themselves.

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