On hearing about the Canon Hacking Developing Kit (CHDK), I fantasized about the amazingly fast/slow exposure settings and RAW image capabilities that might be possible with my Canon S5 IS, one of the most advanced Canon Powershots available.

I don't consider myself a pro photographer--but I'm more advanced than your average consumer. One of my professors is a Newsday Pulitzer winner whose work I've always been in awe of. I've shot baseball games, concerts with Stephen Lynch, and lectures by Al Sharpton just to name a few. To know that I'd be able to do exactly everything that my professor can do with his Nikon D80, using a camera that costs much less and a free download of the CHDK is...well, how would you react?

Above is a shot of one of my editors, Brian Heater. Notice that with the CHDK, I was able to show the blur of his hand moving over his face. More after the jump.

The Canon Hacking Developing Kit allows you to shoot in RAW (CRW), do motion detected trigger photography, customize your display info, and use high-speed flash synch, at all speeds up to 1/64,000 second (even faster in some cameras). Most important, it gives you a battery indicator. It offers its own zebra mode (to tell if something is over or under exposed) and a live histogram (for balanced shots), though those are already available on my high-level S5 IS. It also adds a text reader and games, among many other items.

Installing CHDK is very easy. All you need to do is make your SD card bootable (for this camera it work on SD cards below 4GB), load up the application, lock the SD card, and you're all set. This is the Cliffs Notes version; the official Web site goes much more into detail.

The standard S5 IS shutter speeds range from1/3,200th of a second to 15 second with f 2.7 to f 8.0. With the CHDK, I get shutter speeds from 65 seconds to 1/33333 seconds with f2.7 to f11. This is a huge difference. It means that I can look straight at the sun and shoot it with little to no problems. It also means that I can photograph water droplets, flying bullets, squirrels jumping from tree to tree, and beautiful NYC night scenes without a flash. The possibilities are endless.

This is a shot of the sun outside of Ziff Davis Media Headquarters, shot with a 1/6,400th second exposure with f11. No editing has been done to this image except a white balance setting to daylight.

While shooting in RAW format, there is about a 2- to 4-second lag in taking the shots; as opposed to shooting in JPEG, the shots are processed immediately. This is because shooting in RAW gives you uncompressed data, and JPEG files compress data and throw away all the unneeded information to save space on your SD card. If you think there isn't huge difference, consider a 9MB RAW image versus a 2MB JPEG image saved to an SD card. Post-processing with RAW is very easy to accomplish, by using dng4ps2 to convert the image to a DNG (or Digital Negative) and then processing the DNG in Photoshop. When you're all done with editing, Photoshop can convert the image to a JPEG.

The abilities you get from CHDK are very useful for photo enthusiasts, parents trying to capture that really special split-second moment, gadget freaks, and anyone who's serious about photography but doesn't want to deal with the costs of getting a DSLR.

Others may be intimidated by shooting and editing RAW images. Unless you fall into one of the above categories, you probably no need for shutter speed beyond what the standard S5 IS can provide. And you can always raise the ISO levels to around 400 to get shots that most people would be satisfied with. JPEG images are much more user-friendly.

Overall though, I'm keeping the CHDK on my camera. I love the fact that I can shoot in RAW now, have a battery meter to tell me when I need to charge my batteries, can shoot at absurdly fast and slow shutter speeds, and so on. I'm quite satisfied with the results I've had so far.