May 15, 2024
Camera Capers
Even in our early days of blogging we would try for photos that attractively displayed landscapes, or flowers, birds, or buildings that we saw during the day. But the main reason for photographs was to illustrate the narrative of what happened during the ride. Increasingly, too, they took on the role of reminding us of what happened, showing the names of towns, and helping us get the order of things right. To do all that, what we needed was just a point and shoot camera. Not a smart phone, mind you, because those need lots of hands to hold and shoot, and also may be prone to be bobbled and dropped in a river, or canyon, or such.
Eventually, Scott Anderson showed me his camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS60, and I thought no way for me, because it was twice the size of the point and shoot I was using. But after seeing some of Scott's shots, my mind changed. I was happy that I could still just put the Lumix in a jacket pocket, and everything was fine, until I started to push the Lumix to photograph birds. So often these were up on wires or out on lakes, beyond the Lumix's comfortable zoom, of 720mm. So I would push it into digital zoom, up to 3000 mm, with what Panasonic called its iZoom, and produced some good results, sometimes. I was also tempted by the "Digital Zoom" feature, which takes it to 6000 mm, but that was really poor.
Then came the time in Yucatan when a birdwatcher showed me her Nikon P950. This actually had a "Bird" setting, so maybe it would know what it was doing, even if I might not? This percolated in my mind for a year, until a birthday passed, a birthday that must signify that I have now lost that mind - at least enough to buy an unwieldy and not needed giant camera. Here is the comparison:
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Let's take these last two cameras out for a spin. Start with our front garden, viewed by the maximum zoom of my cheap cell phone:
There are some allium down there, can we have a look at them?
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It will take more experience to really compare the cameras, in various circumstances. Also, I can not guarantee that I standardized the image sizes and settings in this example, and in fact I don't know yet why the Nikon images are uploading smaller. There is a lot to play with- a hallmark of a good present.
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6 months ago