For the last 3 years, I’ve been using a Canon Powershot A700. It’s a 6 megapixel camera with 6x zoom and I really like it. It works great for insects with a terrific macro capability and enough zoom so that I don’t have to necessarily be right on top of my subject. But over the last week, I’ve had nice opportunities to photograph several birds, if I’d only had a longer lense. Since my birthday was last week, I started looking around for something with a bit more reach and found the Olympus SP-565UX, a 10 MP camera with 20X zoom.
I placed the order last Wednesday, so of course, I had to wait all weekend for it to arrive. It finally showed up today and I quickly discovered that the SD card that Dell kindly suggested as a needed accessory wouldn’t fit. It actually uses MicroSD cards, one of which is now on the way. I could still take about 20 photos before the internal memory was full, so I took it out in the yard to give it a try.
I didn’t take the time to read the manual, just tried it using the default settings it came with. Turns out it was set to “normal” instead of “fine,” and I later found that to make a considerable difference.
The first subject I found was this Painted Lady:
Image quality was pretty good, but a little soft, so I gave it a touch of unsharp mask in Photoshop.
I walked on around the pond and saw a Black-throated Green Warbler, an American Redstart, a Black-and-white Warbler, an Indigo Bunting, Downy and Pileated Woodpeckers, a couple of Red-eyed Vireos, several Blue-gray Gnatcatchers and what I think was a Worm-eating Warbler (I only got a very quick glance at it.) I had both the Redstart and Black-and-white Warbler in my viewfinder at a reasonable distance, but it was very coudy and dark so the light was rather poor and I wasn’t able to get the auto-focus to lock onto the correct area. I’ve since changed the AF settings and I’m hoping for better results now.
I was headed back to the house to download what I had on the camera and along the way I walked close to a Multi-flora Rose. Out pops Momma Cardinal:
and there amid the briars was this:
That lighter colored egg in the foreground looks suspiciously like a Cowbird egg to me. It’s not surprising, a very large percentage of songbird nests in this area seem to end up with Cowbird eggs in them, unfortunately.
That was all for this evening. I’ll be trying again as soon as the weather cooperates. The weatherman is calling for rain for the rest of the week, but I have high hopes for the weekend.