A thousand beginner questions (1 Viewer)

Finally, before I hit the sack at long last, some random discoveries and observations.

Wear a hat. A broad-brimmed hat lets you shade the screen on the camera without needing a third hand or yet more gear to carry around with you.

The Swarovski adaptor is very practical. I'm getting to the point where I can slip it on and off in just a few seconds and without losing focus or allignment. It doesn't have a hole to let you adjust the e/p zoom, but that doesn't really matter very much: you can adjust the zoom by part-removing the adaptor and slip the adaptor back down in about 5 seconds. Less with more practice, no doubt.

1 battery = 1.1 512MB flash cards (no flash, fine quality, full resolution).

Playing with the ISO is a bad idea. Unless you are really struggling with the light, even 200 ISO is noticably grainy, 400 much more so. But - a saving grace - if you shrink the picture by, say, 66.6%, the graininess all but dissappears. A useful thing to bear in mind for "must-have" opportunities when the light is poor.

I'm almost half sorry I ddn't take Kevin's advice and get the carbon fibre tripod. The whole rig is a bit too heavy to be really comfortable with if you are moving around. But it's not the tripod that is the main culprit - it's that heavy darn Manfrotto 501 head. A lighter head would be really nice.

In a perfect world, the Swarovski would have a 10 - 40 zoom E/P rather than the 20 - 60. (I don't know if that is technically possible. Probably not.)

In that same perfect world, the eye relief would be longer, and not need to be carried around in your pocket just in case you want to put the camera aside and simply enjoy the birds. (I have long eyelashes - maybe I should just cut them!)

Nikon's auto-repeat function is your friend. Take shots machine-pistol style: three or four at a time: you can't hope to overcome that terrible shutter delay, but if you bang off lots of shots, sooner or later one of them will be at that exact moment the bird does what you want. Helps reduce camera-shake too. Flash cards are cheap: fill them up.

The moment you get the bird roughly centered in the viewfinder, press the shutter button. Then fiddle about with fine focus and anything else you want to do before you go for your perfect shot: that way, if the bird flies off, at least you will have something.


Enough. Bedtime!

Tony

I guess you have chucked yourself in at the deep end a bit in starting out in winter. Extremely encouraging how good the results you've shown already are.

If you can't get out at all, two links that might be of interest between melancholic gazes out the window. The first is to the Neat Image web site where you can download a free application that may well help remove the noise from those ISO 400 images :

www.neatimage.com

The second is to a page of photos by a digiscoper I believe Andy Bright admires for his ability to get shots in low light forest situations :

www.indiabirds.com/obc/Content/PhotographerGallery.asp?Birder_ID=58

Thanks, Norm. I'll check those out when I get a spare moment - which is something I seem to be very short of this week - between work and family commitments and a few other things, I'm flat out like a lizzard drinking.

But seeing as I've been adding stuff to this as I go along, and it's turning into a sort of "diary of a beginning digiscoper", I might as well keep it up to date. Perhaps others coming along will be able to read it and get an idea of the ups and downs of learning this difficult art.

Here is the precis so far:

1st weekend: experimenting & battling with bad light. Plovers, Red-winged Parrots & etc. Usable pictures but nothing fantastic.

2nd weekend: mostly waterbirds, better light. Some really nice pictures.

A stolen day mid-week: all waterbirds and close-to-water birds. Egret, bathing plover, lots of others. Very happy with this day's work.

Today was a perfect winter's day: sun out 90% of the time, some wind but not enough to give me camera shake. So I spent the whole day taking photos. I got multiple good, clear, close-up shots of Pacific Black Duck, Hoary-headed Grebe, Pink-eared Duck, Dusky Moorhen, Coot, White-winged Chough, Scarlet Robin, White-winged Triller, New Holland Honeyeater, and various others. I was just a fraction too slow to get pictures of a Goldfinch and a magnificent Brown Falcon that sat calmly in a dead tree and watched me stop the car, get out, open the boot, extract my gear, set up the tripod, aim and focus, then - as I reached for the shutter release - flew off. No matter. A very productive day.

When I got home, to my intense fury, I discovered that every single one of my 437 photographs is hopelessly out of focus. (Beat head against wall, tear hair out, hit self with 10 pound hammer.) I used the exact same method that I have had success with on previous outings - my Great Egret in flight, for example.

Turns out that, in attempting to turn the pop-up flash unit off, I'd set the camera to fixed focus at infinity. (The two or three landscapes I took without the scope came out fine, and a handful of shots happened to have something interesting in the far background which was focused OK.) Luckily, although I think there were plenty of good shots ("good" in the sense that if it hadn't been for my set-to-infinity stupidity they would have been well worth keeping), so far as I know, there were none that were real rip-snorters and irreplacable.

Next up, I couldn't find the CP4500 manual! So I went to their web site and - astonishingly - they don't seem to have a PDF of the manual available for download so that I can print one out. Even the cheapest and nastiest $130 computer motherboard had a downloadable copy of the manual online - but not the $1300 Coolpix. A black mark on Nikon's report card - they are supposed to be a quality organisation.

But although Nikon's main websites are unhelpful and very badly organised, it turns out that their Malaysian subsiduary has more sense and offers a wide range of manuals for download. Worth bookmarking!

Anyway, in a fit of pique, I have cancelled tommorow's appointments, and plan to retrace my steps and try to reshoot the whole darn lot. I hope the birds are still in the same places!

Tannin,

Go to www.nikon-euro.com/nikoneuro2/download/download_manuals100.htm#Coolpix

The manual is after the Coolpix5700 and is listed as Coolpix 4500 Guide to Digital Photography.

Felipe

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