It seems like this tree was not prepared for winter this year. It created a spectacular contrast next to the entrance of the building where I do my daily laboring.

Finally! I have been waiting for the first snow to fall since I got here. I mean - in South Africa we do not really know snow. Especially not where I lived. There seems to be something magical (for me) about the first snow. And this year we got it in spades. It seems like the weather held back - even at Halloween we had no snow. But yesterday all that changed. Yesterday it started with sleet... At 18:00 this is how my back yard looked like:

This was the result of a full day of ice rain/wet snow. Not too impressive... So I went to bed and this morning, i.e. 14 hours later, this is how that same scene looked like:

Wales translation error

I did a very informal, technically incorrect shootout between the 5 cameras owned between myself and my wife and daughter. I tried to keep the basic stuff consistent - such as aperture and framing and distance to subject. But due to the nature of the cameras used it was not always possible. Also note that I left most processing on the default values everywhere. I did no special processing on any file.

The comparison is between my iPhone 3G 2MP camera phone, Olympus 850SW P&S, Canon PowerShot G10 14.7MP, Nikon D80 10.2MP DSLR and the Canon 1Ds Mark III 21.1MP DSLR. ISO was at base ISO for most shots - except for the Canon and Nikon which were at ISO200. Aperture was set to the lenses' optimum values. No tripods were used - all shots were handheld. This was done to show how each camera performed under typical scenarios where you might not have time to set up on a tripod.

My Canon PowerShot G10 just arrived two days ago from my favourite retailer, B&H. So I took it out a couple of times and have some photos I'll upload soon. Here is one teaser so long... Straight from the camera - JPEG, no post processing.