Birding.

[amberjack1234]

I am an old birder too. My last wife use to spend at least $150 a month on bird seed and sugar water for the humming birds. I still have my eastern blue birds that their ancestors have nested in the box that I built out of Cyprus for the last 35 years. Their young still seem to recognize me. Sometimes flying down in front of the lawnmower and almost getting hit catching the bugs that I flush up. Have a lot of other birds too but they are not regulars here. I just built a new box for my blue birds last year.

 

Not to forget the squirrels. 100 pound bag of Virginia peanuts a month for them. She would go outside and call them and they would come from all directions like a Tarzan movie. One old female would sit in her lap on the front porch swing for an hour or two sometimes and let her pet and scratch her. My wife now does not support any of that.

[MikeandRong]

It always amazes me when you start to get the regulars showing up with such regularity. A lot of times because they come so close you can start to readily recognize individual ones due to a unique marking or particular personality. Had 2 giant birds of prey circling way way up there today, riding the thermals up even higher till they were just specks, then off they went. And the whole time neither of them had to not so much flap a wing, just stretch out and circle up.

 

Well I popped a couple of pictures and blew them up and plugged it into the new ID app. Came back as Golden Eagles. My money would be on 2 fully matured Red Tail Hawks. I've seen some truly huge ones that hung around where I would pheasant hunt, waiting to swoop down and snatch one up that had been shot before the dog could retrieve it. Also had Goldens and Baldys do the same with ducks durning the fall migration along the backwaters of the Mississippi River (Iowa/Minnesota/Wisconsin triangle where they all touch together).

 

And speaking of squirrels, I have a few of my favorites too. Again, each with unique markings and personalities. Had a brand new one show up today. Jet black with a red tail fron the base to tip. Got a few pics of him too. That's such a rare color and body part combination I doubt there will be another like that for a long long time.

 

I'm having a heck of a hard time posting the pics using my IPad, so bear with me as this thread evolves. On the PC it used to be a piece of cake, so I could maybe go back to uploading to the PC, then being able to share instantly without having to click on a link just to look at the photo.

The

I agree too, very relaxing and stress free.

[amberjack1234]

That was a great story about the squirrels. We have fox squirrels here in all colors. They are huge. The wife had a flying squirrel that was orphaned and she took care of him until he died. I built the cutest cage for him. They are nocturnal so you didn't see much of him unless she would take him out and play with him while I could change the pine straw and cotton in his cage.

[MikeandRong]

Taken with a Nikon D3300. Huge difference in clarity.

[MikeandRong]

Taken with a IPhone 4S, so not very good, but a rare squirrel none the less. At least I'll have the Nikon for the summer on loan.

 

 

 

 

[dnoblett]

That Nikon will hook you...

 

One key in clarity is the F-Stop which controls the Aperture (The iris in the lens) which can vary the depth of field (makes it so only subject is in focus and fore and background are out of focus or can be adjusted so everything is in focus.

 

Love shooting with an SLR.

 

SLRs have several modes to play with.

 

A-Priority, you set the F-Stop for depth of field effect and the camera decides the shutter speed for proper exposure.

S-Priority, you set the shutter speed to control more or less motion blur, the camera sets the F-Stop for proper exposure.

P-Mode, the camera does all the decision making judging on focal length and lighting and it picks a combination, however many times what it picks is not quite what you had in mind.

M-Mode, you have to use the indicators to determine exposure and set both speed and F-Stop.

 

I have a Sony Alpha which built on an anti shake system developed by Minolta, it uses inertial sensors to read camera shake and moves the sensor to compensate, it allows handholding the camera and allows lower shutter speeds on longer lenses minimizing motion blur

[MikeandRong]

That Nikon will hook you...

 

One key in clarity is the F-Stop which controls the Aperture (The iris in the lens) which can vary the depth of field (makes it so only subject is in focus and fore and background are out of focus or can be adjusted so everything is in focus.

 

Love shooting with an SLR.

 

SLRs have several modes to play with.

 

A-Priority, you set the F-Stop for depth of field effect and the camera decides the shutter speed for proper exposure.

S-Priority, you set the shutter speed to control more or less motion blur, the camera sets the F-Stop for proper exposure.

P-Mode, the camera does all the decision making judging on focal length and lighting and it picks a combination, however many times what it picks is not quite what you had in mind.

M-Mode, you have to use the indicators to determine exposure and set both speed and F-Stop.

 

I have a Sony Alpha which built on an anti shake system developed by Minolta, it uses inertial sensors to read camera shake and moves the sensor to compensate, it allows handholding the camera and allows lower shutter speeds on longer lenses minimizing motion blur

Daughter came home for the summer and brought the Nikon with her. Mine to use and learn to use the next couple of months. By then I should have a pretty good grasp of what I'm going to invest in. I will start working on those tips you gave me, checking out the results as we go. I'll bet by the time August rolls around there should be some pretty amazing photos added to this thread. I'm quite behind the technology curve and have a lot of catching up to do. But I do pick up things fairly well and we will just have to let the results speak for themselves.

 

Many thanks again for the time you are spending on the quality information and pointers. I'm off to a good start from just last week even.

[amberjack1234]

Back in the old days, now I've given my age away , I use to have a Cannon EOS 850. Just after I bought it the digital age came in and made it like last years computer. I only used it for about 3 years and it became a hassle to get the prints processed so I just put it away. I had a very expensive, cost more than the camera, lens with it too. I have a very cheap small digital camera now. The wife hates pictures for some reason so I don't see investing in a high or mid range digital camera. As for myself I do enjoy taking pictures.

 

We did take an extended trip a little over a year ago and I took the ole EOS but stupid da man, that the wife says I am, was checking it out to see if everything was working and forgot to turn it off. When I got it out to take a picture and all excited to take a picture of a mama grizzly bear and her cub. Well you know the rest of the story. No new batteries for it anywhere either. Had to order that one on ebay and I thought that she would have bought two but he being Chinese I should have know better.

[dnoblett]

One more pointer on SLR, like film cameras you have film speed or ISO setting, the higher the ISO the faster the exposure, the trade off is graininess or noise, faster is good to freeze motion or low light, use lower ISO for quality but will need lower shutter speeds or larger F-stops.

 

Play with these settings and see what they do.

[MikeandRong]

Did some tests of 5 each setting of same scene A, S, P, M, Auto. Once daughters get home later tonight I'll have them download to their computer. Then I can start to compare for the kind of pictures I will plan to be taking. It's a starting point and slowly add in more features until I can't tell the difference unless it's way enlarged. That is usually the telling sign.

 

Right now did 3 action shots of the bird taking off and I got a perfect wing pattern, almost as if it was just stretching them open. Not yet perfect, but approaching equal to and even better than I have ever taken before, haha.

[Randy W]

I first got the idea of buying a digital camera when I bought a Sony Hi8 digital video camera around 1992 - I noticed that the CCD arrays had a more flexible sensitivity under various lighting conditions than did film. But it was 10 years later before consumer-quality cameras approached the resolution of film. This was my first digital camera

 

 

I believe it was around 5 mega-pixels, while around 8mp are needed to approach the film resolution.

 

Anyway, my own opinion is that the digital cameras today have more in common with the video cameras than with the old film cameras. Sony and Panasonic both have there own lens affiliations (Carl Zeiss and Leica, respectively), and had top-rated video cameras.

 

Sony has always put the best research into CCD's and color spaces, and so is my preference, but I think Panasonic has better firmware for auto-settings. I always have my Panasonic ZS-15 with (that's what I take nearly all the pictures I post with). I also process with an HDR plug-in in Photoshop to make the pictures more vibrant. My OTHER camera is a Sony A550.

[Allon]

I still believe in film and F stops, except for a great 35-150 lens on an Olympus that I have that is digital. I have 1000's of pictures from that camera that I have to digitize somehow. But they take great pictures.

[Randy W]

I still believe in film and F stops, except for a great 35-150 lens on an Olympus that I have that is digital. I have 1000's of pictures from that camera that I have to digitize somehow. But they take great pictures.

 

 

I don't know if they still do this, but I used to take negatives to a photo lab that would produce high resolution Kodak Photo CD's for imaging work (and I was even able to find one that would go the other way - digital file on multiple floppies to a negative, before high res printers were available). Some scanners do a decent job with transparencies (e,g., negatives), but that's a different setting from the usual reflective source (i.e., paper).

[amberjack1234]

Randy, our local CVS use to do that kind of work here in "tourist land" on the beach but that was like a million years ago in the digital world. In fact the last time that I looked the machine was gone but they still do digital to prints. I don't even go in much any more. The wife jumps in and out and I sit in the car keeping it cool for her. Speaking of which, I won't be able to get in the local Food Lion or Wal-Mart until like the end of tourist season and then fishing season at the end of October. That is one of the MANY reasons that I left the beach. I still only live .5 mile from the ocean but it's some better for me now. It would take me 20 minutes to get out of my driveway sometime and sometime more at certain times of the day and depending on how drunk ever body was. I know that everyone loves the beach but what a pain in the ass it is for us locals. Except for all the business owners like I USE to be. They be-a grinning all the way to the bank wif them yankee dollars in ther pokets..

[Randy W]

Randy, our local CVS use to do that kind of work here in "tourist land" on the beach but that was like a million years ago in the digital world. In fact the last time that I looked the machine was gone but they still do digital to prints. . . .

 

 

Yes, back in the day, I bought Photoshop V3.0 which came on about a dozen floppies, and 32MB (mega-bytes) of RAM for OVER $1000 so I could process the images. The photolabs would convert the negatives to PhotoCD's, and I found a shop which would copy the computer images (up to the full 3072x2048 resolution) to slides (usually for presentations). I could then take the slide back to the photolab for a print.

 

Later on (still early 90's here), processors like Seattle Film Works offered 35mm MOVIE film (with better dynamic range than the consumer films - they simply spooled the film onto rolls which fit into your 35mm camera), along with a CD of the images, and a FREE roll of film to make sure you would keep coming back.

 

The PhotoCD's, however, were done by a professional lab and offered better resolution. I still have software which can read the PhotoCD's (.pcd) and SFW files.