i've been circuit bending keyboards, tape machines, and simple synthesizers for about a year now. getting more into it led me into a deep dark hole of dirty video mixing and circuit bending cameras.
i started with a Canon PowerShot A540. this is the seventh camera i've bought with the intention of circuit bending. a few at thrift stores proved useless due to overly complicated design or lack of proprietary batteries. when searching for cameras to bend, simpler and older is better. shopgoodwill.com frequently posts lots of digital cameras that you can purchase for a decent price. i purchased a lot of five which included this camera. every other one was either fried in the process of circuit bending or broken from the start.
i start by unscrewing all visible screws on the outside of the camera. after taking off the outer shell, remove one more screw at the top of the lcd screen and lift the retaining tabs at the bottom of the screen. the screen will come right off. prop it up so that you can view it while you search for bends.
removing the screen gets to the main circuit board. in my experience, avoid everything except for the ribbon connectors. one obviously leads to the screen, another leads to the control board, so the third must lead to the lens.
grab a small gauge wire and strip both ends. power on the camera and start touching the pins that connect the cable to the board, you will either turn the camera off or the image on the screen will begin to distort. bridging two adjacent pins is easiest to solder, but bridging differing combinations of pins will always lead to different bends. be careful to not touch one end of the wire to the connector and another to any other point on the board, you can and will hit something you shouldn't and fry the camera.
i ended up soldering the first two pins together. be very careful when soldering, the components are quite small. my intention was to attach one end of the wire to pin 2 and another to pin 16 but the tip of my iron was too large and just ended up bridging pins 1 and 2. the bend ended up working well.
these are the resulting images
