Much going on here which I can not share because on top of all the other problems the screen on my computer has dimmed down to near invisible. C’est mort.
A bird
Tag: bird
The Portrait of Mister Junco
Vernalis ovum
Spring birds
All photos taken with Nikon P610.
The Chickadee
Bush King
Note: these are not necessarily all the same bird as they were taken over several days as I experimented with the camera & lens, evaluating it for bird photography in fact. Most of the time I was quite close, but some are cropped.
(Photos taken with Olympus E410 & 40-150mm f3.5 lens.)
Pretty pictures
All sorts of things continue to go wrong here, the latest being my computer becoming erratic in function. Gee, twelve years old and rebuilt once and it seems to be having hardware difficulties. Unfortunately I can’t replace it because A). I’m not made of money and computers are just one example of things that have shot up obscenely in price and B). everything that is available (and a lot isn’t) is pretty much junk anyway, and not just because they have Win10/11 on them.
That’s all as may be. I mean; we’re having food shortages here again, the COVID numbers are increasing (12 dead one day, 15 the next), weather is still trying to murder everyone by switching between thaw and melt so there’s ice everywhere, and my wife is still stuck in England for the foreseeable future (things have to stabilize before she comes home and there’s no sign of it happening in either country).
Wow, what fun eh?
I’m even having trouble finishing the lens test series as a result of all this craziness.
In the mean time, let’s just look at some pretty pictures out of the venerable Nikon.
We’ll see how things go the next few days. Although I can’t really plan even a day ahead because the forecast is hit-or-miss and the edicts from On High are random and often confusing. For now I’ll go with the cats’ take on things and sleep as much as possible.
The photographer as a kind of musician
It doesn’t matter how good your instrument is if you don’t know how to play it.
It doesn’t matter how good your camera is if you don’t know how to use it.
High-priced, complex equipment with lots of ‘features’ will not overcome a lack of photographic knowledge just the same as a tin-eared rock star wannabe can’t get a song out of a Gibson Les Paul. If the player has the talent though, a Silvertone will sing for him.
Here’s me playing my ol’ Sears Silvertone, as it were. I make no apologies about the boast.
Pictures taken with the Nikon P610; the camera I keep coming back to despite its ailments. I think manufacturers should be really embarrassed that their much-more-expensive ‘professional’ DSLRs can’t do any better than this low-dollar, ten-year-old ‘bridge’ camera.
Backlog of birds
All kinds of things going on here, including wood harvesting, bad weather, and an utterly useless national election that wasted a huge amount of money for no reason whatsoever.
Not much photography though, for the reasons previously explained.
Here are some bird pictures left over from when I could take pictures.
Above taken with the Nikon P610.
Taken with the Pentax K100D.
Taken with the Lumix ZS60, believe it or not.
Taken with the Olympus E410.
Once again, I am cheated out of the ability to add to or subtract from my equipment stocks. I thought of buying a proper adaptor for the one FD mount lens I have, but I paid <$30 for the lens (with shipping) and can’t justify paying >$30 for the adaptor. It just doesn’t make sense.
It also doesn’t make sense that ego-Bay keeps sending me e-mails about items I’ve looked at when I can’t even sign in to delete the account. Talk about intractable stupidity!
Square on
A few ‘incidental’ photos that came about while shooting with various cameras. The common denominator here is that they all looked better cropped square.
The good news is we’ve had more rain and the fires are taking a beating from it, although it’s smoky today. Not long ’til September and the next thing you know …
Re-learning curve: Canon 1Ds
“Re-learning”? Not with this camera! This is the ‘full frame’ DSLR, and as such has the largest and brightest viewfinder. Seeing what I’m trying to photograph is the biggest problem these days, and with the 1Ds it’s almost not an issue. Likewise the Canon G11 with its optical finder gives similar performance. Only the EVFs and smaller, dimmer optical finders present much difficulty.
Okay this camera still has poorly-thought-out controls, but I know where they are and don’t have to change them often. Also it weighs a lot. But what about the all-important results? Well I took 28 photos and only 6 of them are actually bad. That’s the best post-eye-problem ratio of any camera I’ve got.
All these photos were taken with the 75-300mm Canon EF lens. Some are the full image, some are cropped to varying degrees. This is not the best lens either, but it was cheap and it works.
The success with using this camera reinforces the validity of my revised plan. In fact replacing this camera and the T100 with a 5D Mk II would by viable, but unlikely to happen. At this point I’m aiming for keeping the Fuji F80, Canon G11, Nikon P610 (which needs replacing at a later date), Canon T100, and this Canon 1Ds. Also I will use various adapters to allow the use of classic lenses with either Canon DSLR (the full frame cameras are not quite as good with this due to some lenses getting in the way of the larger mirrors).
To that end I have purchased some new equipment which hasn’t arrived yet but will result in further posts when it does. I’m not doing so well at selling off the superfluous stuff, but then there’s a lot else going on around here now with the start of the annual wood harvest.
Wandering Words 