19 « February « 2009 « Featherstone Quiltworks

Archive of entries posted on 19th February 2009

Out My Window

19 February 2009, 12:03 pm

The Lazy Woman’s Guide to Nature Photography…

I haven’t seen anything interesting going on out my window for weeks, so it was fun to see this hawk just sitting on a branch (slightly obstructed, but he didn’t listen to my request to “move over”). I can’t tell for sure, but we usually see red-tailed hawks around the pond. Not especially great photos, but this fits with my previous post below about cameras. Here is a photo taken with my new 3x zoom Canon, fully zoomed in:

hawk0011

And here is a photo taken with my Lumix fully zoomed in 48x:

hawk0004

FYI: These aren’t cropped or anything — straight out of the camera(s). I did save them at a lower resolution so they don’t take so much space on my blog and take so long to come up.

ADDITIONAL NOTE & PHOTO:

The hawk did hear me! He moved to a better branch, but now he’s in silhouette form. But I love how you can see the point of his beak and the talon. I think he must be hunting for the mice and voles to appear out of our dwindling snow cover. The background is the frozen pond.

p1100231

Sue

Filed under Out My Window.

3 Comments

Cameras & Kittens

19 February 2009, 9:10 am

THE BIG GUY . . .

camera0006

I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20. It is three years old, and it’s a great camera. I bought it because of the zoom capability (I love taking bird photos), and because it has an awesome lens for this type of camera. It also has image stabilization, which has become more common in cameras since then. I’m not a real camera techie, I just know enough to be dangerous. Here are the features important to me, in layman’s terms:

It has a 12 x optical zoom and a 4 times digital zoom. This means I can zoom to 48 times, but you do lose quality when you go above the 12 x optical zoom. The zoom is equivalent to a 36-432 zoom on a 35mm camera.
And with this much zoom, you do need the image stabilization, which steadies a little hand shake in long shots.
It has a Leica lens (1:2.8/6-72), and it’s much larger than the typical point-and-shoot lens. Your pictures will only be as good as your lens will allow. Also, a larger lens allows more light in, and I can take more of my photos without a flash.
It’s around 5 megapixels. And physically, it’s about 3 5/8″ x 5″ x 4 1/2″.

I would buy this camera again in a heartbeat, but I haven’t checked yet to see if this model is still available. There are several Lumix models, and they differ quite a bit. My main goal was to get a mega zoom.

THE BABY . . .

camera0002

I just got a new purse/pocket-sized camera because there were many times I wished I had my camera with me, but the BIG GUY (despite its many fine qualities) is just too big to haul around all the time. THE BABY is a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS. Besides being absolutely adorable, she does a fine job taking pictures, and is roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

It has a 3 x zoom (perfectly adequate for people shots and most other pictures).
Much smaller lens (duh — it’s a much smaller camera!)
8.0 megapixels. Physically 2 1/4″ x 3 3/8″ x 7/8″.
Got it in chocolate brown (choosing a color for your camera seemed a little weird, but it is adorable!)
And it also has image stabilization.

I think that, between the two cameras, I really have my picture-taking needs well met! And they both use the same SD cards for photo storage, so I can interchange them between the cameras.

A Warm Fuzzy . . .

Nephew Doug the Forest Ranger posted this link this morning on our family web site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rooyt3ptNco