The moment I picked up the Canon EOS RP, I marvelled at how lightweight it was. In fact, it is only 485g! It is also very compact and easy to carry around, with a dimension of merely 132.5mm x 85.3mm x 70mm. Besides the weight and size, the cost is a major factor to me when I choose a camera, and for a full-frame camera, a $1999 price tag sounds pretty good to me. Performance is great as well, but there’s only so much I can tell you. Let me show you some of the (admittedly amateur) shots I took at Little India.
Olive Paella Rice
Shawn (NXT’s Managing Editor) and I had lunch at a cafe and I was pleasantly surprised by the presentation of the dish and the mocktail. I shot using the Food Scene mode which seems to increase the saturation of the food, making the orange color of the sausages pop.
The aperture was set low to draw attention to the main dish, but I did not want a barren background as well. The colourful cups stacked on a water jug, promotion menu and pepper were already placed there, and they filled the otherwise empty space on the long table quite nicely. I also had three shades of pink together in a shot – the door paint, mocktail umbrella, and the mocktail cordial.
It is fun to play with colours in food photography because to me, they’re the key difference between food that makes your mouth water and food that is simply boring. I’m confident that with the Canon EOS RP’s 26.2-megapixels CMOS sensor, I can blow the picture up into billboard size and it will still look just as yummy with all the details captured sharply.
A Warm Welcome from the Elephant
I went to a shop that sells home decorations and knickknacks. I picked up the camera and shot at Auto mode with an elephant statue as the subject. Call it the rule of thirds if you’d like to, but the intention was simply to capture the elephant as if it was ushering people into the store and gesturing with its left hand.
A concern I had with this shot was that even though the elephant – the intended point of focus – was in the foreground, the background and its much vibrant colours would steal the attention. Thankfully, the aperture was just right even in auto mode. I could focus easily with a tap on the LCD screen (I like to switch off the touch shutter and so I can tap and focus, and I rarely use the viewfinder), and there are a whopping 4,779 selectable focus positions to tap on! You will never have a time when you cannot focus on the spot you wanted.
Magazines & Murals
The murals in the background of the picture are of a magazine stand with one magazine titled Little India Today. How apt was it to have a real magazine rack next to the mural (I wonder which came first)? I tried a couple of shots from the other end of the wall, with the mural as the foreground and the magazine rack as the background, but the pictures turned out quite flat with a very two-dimensional foreground and a barely visible magazine rack.
I took this picture in Aperture Priority to focus on the magazine in the middle. One thing I wished I could have shown was how the magazines illustrated in the mural (bold bright graphics, some with dated designs) contrasted with the modern day magazines (more monochromatic with sensual shots of models).
Flower Garlands
Here’s a fun fact: Indian culture celebrates the scents and grandeur of fresh flowers at ceremonies. Flowers, in the form of a mala (which means garland), were utilised for the adoration of gods and people.
I took this shot on Auto mode as well when I saw the man stringing up flower garlands for sale. Thankfully it focuses really fast (the EOS RP focuses in 0.05 seconds!) because the man was moving around pretty quickly. It was also interesting to have a man who seems to be a pretty rough sort of guy doing something delicate like stringing flowers into a garland. I love how the red and yellow colours in this picture pop out even without any editing.
