Distant pintails

Just discovered something. A couple or three years ago, I bought myself a new pocket camera, something to put in the glove compartment of the car for emergencies. I took a few photos and was disappointed: they turned out flocculent; enlarging to anything beyond the mini-screen showed a flaky texture, something like the detritus at the bottom of a goldfish pond. Oh, well; it was for emergencies only; it would do.

This week, someone I follow on Twitter was showing how well her camera zoomed, and I was envious; none of my lenses are near as good at seeing an eagle on the far side of the bay, where my eye sees only a small black dot. She must have spent a fortune on equipment, I thought. And then someone asked her about it, and it turns out she's using another of those little point-and-shoot pocket cameras. With great zoom.

So I tried mine. A different camera: this one's a Lumix. And it zooms nicely! I had never bothered trying; if it wouldn't do close shots well, I didn't expect it to see far away.

It's better than my "real" camera. Still flocculent, but look: these were just dark dots on a distant shore.

Pintails, Oyster Bay.

Live and learn.

So today, I took the Lumix for a walk. With the Nikon as back-up. Photos tomorrow.

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Acabo de descubrir algo. Hace unos tres años, me compré una cámara nueva, algo para el bolsillo, algo para tener en el coche por si se me presentara una oportunidad fotográfica cuando no llevaba la cámara "verdadera". Y no me quedé tan contenta: las fotos salían lanudas; viendo las fotos en cualquier tamaño más grande que la pantallita de la cámara descubría una textura como la de la basura que queda en el fondo de un estanque de peces dorados. Bueno, serviría para emergencias, pero nada más.

Esta semana, una persona que sigo en Twitter estaba mostrando como hacía zoom su cámara, y sentí envidia: ninguna de las lentes de mi cámara se acerca a su capacidad de ver un águila en un árbol allá lejos donde el ojo no ve más que un puntito negro. Ella debe haber gastado una fortuna en su equipo, pensé. Y luego alguién preguntó, y ella respondió que solo usa otra de esas camaritas baratas, de bolsillo. Pero sí que hace zoom muy bien.

Así que hice la prueba con la mía. Es otra marca; una Lumix. ¡Y hace zoom igual que la de ella! Nunca había hecho el intento, creyendo que si no servía para las cercanías, menos iba a servir para lejos.

¡Es mejor que mi cámara Nikon! Las fotos siguen lanudas, pero, ¡mira! Estos patos rabilargos eran apenas unos puntos oscuros al otro lado de la bahía.

Foto: patos rabilargos, Anas acuta, en Oyster Bay.

Siempre hay algo para aprender.

Así que hoy saqué a la Lumix a pasear. Con la Nikon por si las moscas. Fotos mañana.

New camera

One day without a pocket camera was one too many. I went out and bought another; a little Sony like the last one. This one is the DSC-WX350.

By the time I got it home and set up, it was too dark to take it for a run outside, so I took a few trial shots into the aquarium.

Red algae, a shred of sea lettuce, and the little blue anemone.

Hairy hermit.

Juvenile leafy hornmouth, bearing three very tiny baby blue anemones. 

One of the miniature orange hermits, on eelgrass.

So far, so good. It's about the same size as the one it replaces, but with better zoom. In this first test, it gives me good colour; difficult through algae-coated glass. It's fast, so it stops even walking hermits in their tracks. Unfortunately, the photos are noisy, and focussing is iffy on tiny things. But I do like its speed.

I won't be using it for my critters, though. The real test will be tomorrow: skies, stuff, buildings, roadsides, people.

Practice makes ... well, a bit better.

I have a lot to learn about my camera and its possibilities. On lazy days, sometimes I spend a few hours just practicing, and then tossing hundreds of photos.

Laurie found these mushrooms in a dry spot near the rhododendrons. I haven't tried to ID them, instead spent time playing around with the lighting, trying to get true colours indoors without extensive Photoshopping afterwards. I photographed them on the kitchen counter against a blue background, to tone down the yellow of the overhead light, which is supposedly "soft white". These turned out almost right; the rest were deleted at first glance.

(I did a bit of post processing, mostly to clean up scattered dust and lighten one where the flash failed to work.)

A bit too much yellow from room light.

Better, but I had to lighten it up, so the blue background almost disappeared.

These look about right.

And I took a spore print, half on black, half on plain white paper. The spores turned out charcoal grey.

The half on white paper. Not very informative, but there's no lighting problem here; I scanned the print.

Miss B and the new lens

Tonight, Laurie spied a spider creeping out from under a bookcase to grab a tiny fly. One of Brownie's relatives; it's been a while since I saw one. We've had a long, almost critterless winter around here.

Time to test out the new macro lens. I took a dozen shots, then she objected to the flash and went to hide under the books again.

Photo #3, unedited except for lighting, and cropped to about 1/4 the original. (Click to see full size.)

The lens has its quirks. I'll have to do quite a bit of work to learn to use its good points and compensate for the problems.

I can't crawl in too close. That's good, and not so good. I'd never have gotten an inch from Miss B, here, as I would have had to do with the old cameras. But I'm also getting a lot of background, wasted pixels.

The closest I can manage to focus is at 6 inches. And there, the depth of field is next to nil. In the photo above, the tips of her legs and the back half of her abdomen are out of focus.

Miss B's fly, very small. Only a narrow strip of carpet is in focus; a quarter inch at the most.

The camera is quick, and has VR (vibration reduction) enabled. This really helps with camera shake, a big help when I'm on belly and elbows on the floor, hand-holding the camera, stalking a critter that moves about. Only three photos out of the dozen were badly blurred, a record for me.

And the flash works consistently, without a long wait to recharge.

Focussing, even in the semi-dark, is quick and accurate. When the spider wandered off, the focus followed her.

But. I'll have to work up to manual focus, to be able to aim at the part of the spider I'm interested in. Eyes and fangs, for example. The Auto focus just says, "Small object!" and aims for the center, ending up with a knee in focus and the eyes a blur.

Note: Steatoda bipunctata (Miss B and all her kin) make very messy webs. Even to their bug tie-downs. No neat butcher's packages for them.

Also: S. bipunctata's favourite food is sowbugs. With my nose on the carpet, I could see under the bookshelf. Miss B's stash of leftover dinners is a couple or three dried sowbugs.