Hawk pictures from Lighthouse Field

[ritaxis]

I don't know about the baby hawk Nadine says she saw. What I saw today was just an adult hawk hanging out on a snag, turning its head in a direction that forced me to photograph it into the light. I could get really close to the dead tree, but since it is what? 50 feet? tall -- my house is 25 feet at the peak and if I imagine two of them stacked on top of each other I guess that's about how tall it is -- there were diminishing returns when I got too close because I had a bad angle on the thing.

So these are cropped, not resized, and that's just the quality you get with the zoom out past the max optical and into the digital (is it necessarily the case as I have found that the digital zoom is just not as clean as the optical? -- and do other cameras send you through the optical zoom and then stack digital on top of it when you run out of optical?). The nice fellow has been begging to buy me a telephoto lens and I finally said he can, and a wide-angle one because I keep not being able to get a good handle on landscapes, and he can buy me a tripod too because if I'm going to do more bird and landscape pictures I need to be a lot steadier.

Comments

[ellarien]

Those are better than I usually manage with birds!

The digital zoom will never be as clean as the optical one -- it's basically just the camera doing the crop-and-blow-up for you. In my camera, the stacking of the digital zoom on top of the optical is called 'smart zoom', and is an option that can be turned off by pushing the right buttons. (I did, after surprising myself with a really bad waterlily shot.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

In my camera I don't have to use the digital zoom at all. In fact it's a little cranky about it and if you're leaning on the zoom button and it reaches that interval where it has zoomed as much as it can op[tically it hesitates and drags its little electronic feet.

They are coming along, aren't they? Last year's hawk pictures never came out this well. Of course, I took nearly twenty pictures to get that many decent ones.

I figured out how the camera tells me about focus, which I swear was not in the manual. I mean it has a couple of visual signals that give more information than the apparent blurriness of the image in the viewfinder does. Also I've figured out that with birds, you have to start squeezing off pictures before the good one comes up, and keep squeezing them out until your batteries run out or the bird flies away. And you have to keep moving between shots to get different angles, but quietly so you don't bug the bird, and you have to do a dance between taking enough time to get excellent focus and taking the shots fast enough to get them before the bird is gone.

I also figured out how I'm going to go about getting pictures of swallows and swifts. When the nice fellow produces that tripod and telephoto lens I'm going to set up in the field with the camera pointed at the quadrant where the birds are doing their number and just fill up the chip with picture after picture, pressing the button just before the bird gets into view, over and over till I get that bird.

I think that's a several dog walk project, though.

[ellarien]

Mine beeps when the focus locks on, which could be a disadvantage when trying not to disturb the subject. (On the other hand, it got me that curious highland calf a couple of weeks ago.)

I'm starting to hanker after a bigger and better camera than the one I have (more zoom, real macro), but the thing about mine is that I can and do take it pretty much anywhere without worrying about weight or bulk, and I doubt I'd get nearly as much use out of a more expensive one.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

What I hanker after is:

12X optical zoom
full manual override on everything plus the basic auto features
takes ordinary rechargeables and not some stupid proprietary thing
takes a standard SD disk and not some stupid proprietary thing
choice of through-the-lens or screen viewing
some reasonable number of pixels.
snap-on, snap-off lenses
a lens cap that stays on
fits in a large jacket pocket

I have the batteries and disk and viewing, and the pixels aren't bad.

[kiya]

Completely off-topic (though those are some lovely photos):

I'm poking at a bit in the WIP where I'm trying to figure out how to go back through on the editing pass to make sure I get some of the cultural nuances right on the characters, and brooksmoses thought you might have some useful thoughts about it -- could I drop you an email? I'm not sure I can get it out in the right shape for posting it to rasfc, and I don't want to spoiler betareaders.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Okay, go right ahead. I'm intensely curious about what cultural nuances would be the ones I would be helpful with . . .

[kiya]

Thanks so much.

I've sent a slightly rambling thing to the cruzio address.