I saw this while catching up on the thread while at work and it needs to be said: You're rocking that 'do so hard I almost dropped my phone and fell down the stairs trying to catch it. Coworker thought I'd had a stroke or something.
@Sarapis I'm sure it's been asked before, but what camera are you using? Your pictures are beautiful. I think I'm using my Canon Rebel wrong cause they do not look that good!
@Mageta Well, that's a new camera for me actually, as I'm borrowing some gear for this trip - my normal camera has a fixed (no zoom, not interchangeable) 35mm lens. Great for many things. Useless for wildlife photography. I took the borrowed gear out today during lunch to try it out and get familiar with it.
This one is an Olympus e-m5 mark II camera, with an Olympus 150-300mm lens on it (the equivalent of 300-600mm on a 35mm camera). I'm very impressed with the camera itself. It's like magic. The above are hand-held shots at full zoom. The camera has 5-axis in-camera stabilization and it is kind of amazing. I've used stabilized lenses before, but they were only like 2 or 3 stop stabilization. This is equivalent to five stops (meaning you can shoot five stops slower than normal and get the same sharpness on a non-moving subject because it can compensate so heavily for unsteady human hands) and works on most lenses you'd put on it.
The lens is meh, and to me it shows in the picture, but the lens is tiny for super telephoto lens like that. It only weights about 1.2 pounds, and is only about 5 or 6 inches long. To get a lens with that kind of zoom on either a full or cropped-frame DSLR the lens would be gigantic, not to mention extremely expensive. This lens is only $500, and I can fit it in my wife's purse. Even a bargain lens that can reach to 600mm for a full-frame DSLR, like the Sigma 150-600mm is twice as expensive, weighs almost 7 pounds, and is huge.
It's the perfect camera/lens combination for a portable wildlife experience where you don't want to carry around a giant tripod, giant lens, and giant camera, which I never want to do. The quality is only medium, though that's mainly the lens - I'm borrowing another (non-telephoto) lens for this camera and the pics coming out of it are substantially better quality, and in full daylight like this, the camera is awesome. It's less awesome in low light, just by dint of having a substantially smaller sensor than full-frame cameras like my normal one or the higher end DSLRs, and because it has a smaller sensor it's not capable of producing the kind of super-shallow depth of field that larger sensor cameras can, but that's ok - no camera can do everything equally well.
The other thing is that you're likely having your camera process your images for you. I prefer to process them myself to give me control over what the image looks like rather than having random software on the camera decide. I also shoot in raw format rather than jpg, which gives you an image with much more data in it, and so lets you do more with it in programs like Adobe Lightroom. In these images, for instance, I increased the contrast, added a very slight vignetting around the edges, added some sharpening, then some smoothing to get rid of sensor noise, cut the highlights down somewhat, and then brought the shadow level down a bit. I also cropped it a bit. Below is an example of what the completely raw photo from the camera looked like. If I was outputting jpgs, the camera would be applying its own idea of balancing exposure, contrast, color saturation and vibrancy, sharpening, etc to the photo. Nothing wrong with that, and it's certainly way less work, but I like processing photos in Lightroom in the same way that old-school film photographers liked/like developing film in their own darkrooms.
And that is probably way more info that you wanted to know.
Comments
Cross-eyed.
Also, that's a lovely beard baby you have there, Multon. Keep it up!
And then we took a dramatic photo and I decided to look like I was horrified:
I MET LUCY MORAN (TWIN PEAKS) TODAY
I am considering a persian, in light of the nuclear talks, but they don't come cheap.
It's called Chocolate Star Bread.
I hope it works.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
This one is an Olympus e-m5 mark II camera, with an Olympus 150-300mm lens on it (the equivalent of 300-600mm on a 35mm camera). I'm very impressed with the camera itself. It's like magic. The above are hand-held shots at full zoom. The camera has 5-axis in-camera stabilization and it is kind of amazing. I've used stabilized lenses before, but they were only like 2 or 3 stop stabilization. This is equivalent to five stops (meaning you can shoot five stops slower than normal and get the same sharpness on a non-moving subject because it can compensate so heavily for unsteady human hands) and works on most lenses you'd put on it.
The lens is meh, and to me it shows in the picture, but the lens is tiny for super telephoto lens like that. It only weights about 1.2 pounds, and is only about 5 or 6 inches long. To get a lens with that kind of zoom on either a full or cropped-frame DSLR the lens would be gigantic, not to mention extremely expensive. This lens is only $500, and I can fit it in my wife's purse. Even a bargain lens that can reach to 600mm for a full-frame DSLR, like the Sigma 150-600mm is twice as expensive, weighs almost 7 pounds, and is huge.
It's the perfect camera/lens combination for a portable wildlife experience where you don't want to carry around a giant tripod, giant lens, and giant camera, which I never want to do. The quality is only medium, though that's mainly the lens - I'm borrowing another (non-telephoto) lens for this camera and the pics coming out of it are substantially better quality, and in full daylight like this, the camera is awesome. It's less awesome in low light, just by dint of having a substantially smaller sensor than full-frame cameras like my normal one or the higher end DSLRs, and because it has a smaller sensor it's not capable of producing the kind of super-shallow depth of field that larger sensor cameras can, but that's ok - no camera can do everything equally well.
The other thing is that you're likely having your camera process your images for you. I prefer to process them myself to give me control over what the image looks like rather than having random software on the camera decide. I also shoot in raw format rather than jpg, which gives you an image with much more data in it, and so lets you do more with it in programs like Adobe Lightroom. In these images, for instance, I increased the contrast, added a very slight vignetting around the edges, added some sharpening, then some smoothing to get rid of sensor noise, cut the highlights down somewhat, and then brought the shadow level down a bit. I also cropped it a bit. Below is an example of what the completely raw photo from the camera looked like. If I was outputting jpgs, the camera would be applying its own idea of balancing exposure, contrast, color saturation and vibrancy, sharpening, etc to the photo. Nothing wrong with that, and it's certainly way less work, but I like processing photos in Lightroom in the same way that old-school film photographers liked/like developing film in their own darkrooms.
And that is probably way more info that you wanted to know.