Pimp my A95

One of the (few) downsides to my little Powershot A95 is that as a point-and-shoot style camera, it’s a touch limited as to what it can do — a standard 3x optical zoom, a fixed lens so no other lenses can be attached, no threads for filters…little things like that. Very normal for a point-and-shoot, of course, but at times, a wee bit limiting.

However, one of the nice things about the A95 is that it is possible to attach some accessories to it. Canon’s Powershot cameras include a detachable ring around the lens assembly that, when removed, reveals a mount point. Canon also supplies a few accessories that can attach to the mount: an adaptor tube, which can then have either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens attached to it. However, as the A95 is a couple years old, these items aren’t incredibly easy to come by anymore.

Last week sometime I stumbled across LensMate, a local company that makes aftermarket adapters for the A95’s mount in both 52mm and 37mm sizes. I went ahead and ordered the 37mm adapter (since I knew my work carried some 37mm filters and accessories), and it arrived in the mail yesterday.

I took the camera in to work so that I could make sure the adapter worked with the filters I wanted to pick up. It did (no surprise, but nice to have it confirmed), so I got three Quantaray filters: a UV Haze, a Neutral Density, and a Circular Polarizer.

Since 37mm is a standard size for camcorder lenses, our store carries a few accessory lenses originally designed for camcorders. Since they’re the same thread size as my new adaptor, I started experimenting with those, and as it turns out, we’ve got a set of a .5x Wide Angle Lens and a 2x Telephoto Lens that fit perfectly, so I started playing with those to see how well they worked. Verdict: not bad, and I may want to pick the set up after my next paycheck.

Then things started getting silly.

See, it was a slow day at work yesterday, and after a bit, Sam (one of my co-workers) and I started wondering just what else we had laying around the store that we could attach to my camera. We’d already verified that the filters and the wide-angle and telephoto lenses were an option. Hmmm…how about an off-camera flash?

While the A95 doesn’t have any sort of attachment for an off-camera flash, Sam pulled out a flash slave unit. This little gadget has a light sensor on one side and a hotshoe for a flash on top. When attached to a flash, it will trigger the flash when it senses the light burst from another flash. We attached that to a simple flash and tried it out. Bingo! It worked! But…how to attach it to the camera? Easy enough, as it turns out — just use a 11 (originally designed to attach floodlights or microphones to videocameras).

The end result: a Canon Powershot A95 with the .5x wide-angle lens and an off-camera flash unit.

But we weren’t done yet.

The next question was just how much telephoto could we rig up? Unfortunately, we couldn’t attach any more telephoto conversion lenses directly to the A95…but we did have a big 1.5x tele converter originally made for a Panasonic Lumix FZ20. The opening for this lens was a good couple inches across, and it came with a specialized tripod bracket that looked pretty promising.

A few minutes later, we had our Frankencamera. The A95 with the Lensmate adapter tube and the 2x teleconverter mounted to the Lumix lens’ bracket pointing into the opening of the Lumix lens for a grand total of a 9x optical ‘zoom’ (on-camera 3x, 2x converter, 1.5x converter). It looked goofy as all getout, was awkward, and heavy — but it worked! On top of that, when we turned on the A95’s 4x digital zoom (which I generally don’t use, but for the sake of experimenting…), we ended up with a 36x zoom system! Not very pretty, to be sure…but we’d managed to do it, which was good enough for us.

For our last experiment, Sam decided to see how bright he could get the flash setup. This ended up with two video brackets attached to the camera holding two slave units with flashes attached, and one flash with a built-in slave off to one side (we’d have put another one of those on if we’d had one). Let me assure you, the A95’s flash plus three external flashes is bright!

In the end, much amusement was had, and my little A95 went through a lot of quite silly experiments. This is the kind of stuff that happens on a slow day in a camera shop.

Can’t say that I’m complaining.

More photos of our goofing around are in this Flickr set.

“Battle Flag” by Lo-Fidelity Allstars feat. Pigeonhed from the album How to Operate With A Blown Mind (1998, 5:39).