After messing around with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with it. At 1.8, the depth of field is ridiculous—for example, it is very easy to get the wrong part of a face in focus. The lens has a bit of trouble focusing, particularly in low light, and the motor is fairly noisy. Going for the $350 f/1.4 USM lens would probably fix these problems. I also definitely noticed the lack of IS as compared with the kit lens, but as this thing is so fast I really can’t complain about that. In fact, any criticism of this lens can be more or less rebutted by recalling the absurdly low price.

So, here are a few pictures I took with this thing. Several of them were outside at night, and they were all taken without a tripod(!).

My brother Josh.

The street outside my house. Driving was a challenge today.

A branch on our apple tree.

Our mailbox.

My footprints on our front wall.

CHDK has a huge list of features ranging from a file browser to a fancy, live, per-channel histogram to games, but I’m mostly interested in the manual controls and RAW output. After installing it, CHDK allowed me to override many of the settings on my camera to values more extreme than was previously possible. It has a gigantic shutter speed range (something like 2048 s to 1/100,000 s), the aperture can go down to f/16, and the ISO is tweakable by tiny increments over a huge range (which is basically unusable at both ends). Also, I’ve been playing around with saving RAW images (although I purchased a memory card without this in mind, so the number of shots I can take in both RAW and JPEG is pretty limited).

I had installed this before, but gotten rid of it when I didn’t use many of the features. Also, the UI is absolutely terrible (elements on the display tend to collide with other elements, both from the original Canon firmware and elements of CHDK itself). However, I’m going to try to stick it out for a while and use the fancier features to try some new stuff before I get a new camera later this summer (I have my eye on a Canon EOS Rebel XSi). Here’s my first ever attempt at night photography: I stepped outside and took a picture of the street from where I stood, using a 20 s exposure due to CHDK. Yes, I know it’s pretty crappy:

Those street signs are super blown out.

Be back later with pics of Seattle, hopefully including some fireworks.