Canon A3100: Looking Back at My First Camera
I found the first camera I ever owned in a storage bin and it prompted me to share some of my earliest photographs, as well as some of my thoughts on the camera!
While going through a storage bin the other day I came across my very first camera: A Canon PowerShot A3100. I received it as a birthday gift during my teen years and hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. After not touching this camera for many years, I was surprised at how small and plasticky it felt in my hands. Nonetheless, it was this little point-and-shoot camera that I began my journey into photography with well over a decade ago, so it has a bit of sentimental value. Inspired by the discovery, I thought it might be fun to give my thoughts on the camera, and also share some of those early photographs with you!
The Canon A3100 was released in 2009, featuring a 12mp CCD sensor and a 35-140mm lens. By design there are very limited user controls, and nearly everything from ISO to white balance is automatically controlled by the camera. A small button on the back allows minor adjustments to the exposure value, which was occasionally useful. Despite these limitations, I enjoyed the quality of the images that the camera was capable of producing. The camera’s JPEG processor usually did a pleasing job of rendering the colors and tones of a scene, especially considering the low dynamic range this sensor was able to record.
Many of my early photographs fall short not due to the limitations of the camera, which admittedly there are plenty, but rather from the lack of knowledge on how to properly compose a scene. Images with an absurd amount of sky were quite common during my first couple of years. Nonetheless, I did manage to capture a few photographs that even now I am perfectly happy with, including this image from an early morning visit to Marshall Point.
As I alluded to earlier, the camera is definitely on the small side, which is common for a point-and-shoot model. However its size was often a benefit, allowing me to travel light and simply slip the camera into a pocket or small bag. Measuring less than 4 inches on the long end and weighing under 6 oz with the battery installed, it was really easy to tuck away while scrambling along rocks around the shoreline. That helped to make images like this next one at Hendricks Head easier for me to capture.
The sharpness of the retractable lens is decent enough, though the camera automatically applies a level of noise reduction that smooths away some of the detail. I’m sure this was done by Canon to insure the images appeared cleaner to the average user, and they looked fantastic to me at the time. Today I would probably rather accept the noise, but it’s only noticeable upon close inspection.
A much larger limitation of this camera was its low-light capabilities. Small sensors, like the one inside the A3100, are not the most proficient at collecting light when it gets dark. High levels of noise quickly mar night images. On top of this, the autofocus capabilities of the lens often fail to lock onto a target in these conditions. Oftentimes, I would just shoot a bunch of images and hope one of them would be usable!
Despite the CCD sensor falling short in low light performance, it almost always did a fantastic job of reproducing life-like colors and tones. Blues skies and direct light is where it shined the best, but even sunrises/sunsets could look quite nice when metered correctly. This sunset view from Port Clyde is still a favorite of mine. I loved the silhouetted fisherman on the dock!
Though I honed my photographic skills and eventually graduated to more advanced cameras and lenses, my original Canon A3100 will always have a place on my shelf for being the tool that I started my photographic journey with. It was fun reliving some awesome memories as I put this together! I hope you enjoyed this glimpse at my first camera and the images it produced as much as I did. I’ll leave you a few more images captured with this camera during those early years.
Thanks for reading!
I remember many of these shots and the trips we took where you captured them. A fun memory lane trip for me too!
Wonderful photos. My first camera was not quite as good as yours. It was a cheap point-and-shoot film camera. I was 12 at the time, so it would have been the summer of 1969.