Bigshent
Biddulph Birder
Cool I must try the video on the sx50
-
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Canon SX50 Specs (6 Viewers)
- Thread starter Roy C
- Start date
Cool I must try the video on the sx50
I would spell it 'Eider' on my side of the pond.
They are common where my sister lives in Scotland, I've seen one duck and one drake in my 60 odd years in South Wales. So I don't know them that well.
It's a drake, I'm sure, but not in breeding plumage, so it is either in eclipse plumage or immature - I think the latter, but if someone were to tell me that it was an eclipse plumage I wouldn't bet my flat (apartment to you lol) that they were wrong.
David
crazyfingers
Well-known member
I'm just a crappy speller sometimes.
bob freeman
Well-known member
Upland Birder
Birding On The Edge
Staffordshire Moorlands Landscape/Sunset Photos
Hi all,
Yep I'm also the owner of the Cannon Powershot SX50 HS camera and thought I would share these photos with you. I really like this camera great for landscape and bird photography.
Enjoy
Dean:t:
Hi all,
Yep I'm also the owner of the Cannon Powershot SX50 HS camera and thought I would share these photos with you. I really like this camera great for landscape and bird photography.
Enjoy
Dean:t:
Attachments
RafaelMatias
Unknown member
Beautiful photos! Thanks for sharing!
pooleparrot
Ian Ballam
Beautiful Pintails PP:t:
Nice
The light on the Pintails is lovely. Here is one I took on Friday in the garden with my daughters camera.Attachments
Last edited:
Nice
Another beaut:t:
Dear Forum Members,
I’m new to BirdForum and this is my 1st post.
The comments and tips about the SX50 HS I saw on BirdForum were one of the reasons for me to buy the SX50, so I kind of felt obliged to make this post. Not that I don’t enjoy posting on forums, but it does consume time that could be spent birding… or even working!
The first SX50 I tried was Jan Hillgård’s at Mellbystrand (Halland, Sweden) on the 5th of May. We were there with Anders Wirdheim et al. watching ca. 1000 Red-throated Divers migrating over Laholm Bay. I was impressed by what it could do, considering its price. Later, watching Jörgen Bernsmo using its Canon 7D and 400 mm f5.6 lens at Simrishamn (Skåne), almost made me give the big step and go into DSLR. In the end, back in Portugal, between the price, the bulk, the comments I read on this tread, and the opinions of several friends (notably Pedro “Malhúzia” Marques, Alexandre Vaz, Hans Larsson, Pedro Ramalho and António “Lucky Tony” Gonçalves), I went for the SX50.
Before I get into any kind of details regarding my impressions about the SX50, I think I should stress my background. I come from six years of digiscoping with a Zeiss 15-45x65 scope and a Nikon Coolpix P5100 camera. After sometime, I think I was getting pretty good results with this equipment, but you can judge for yourself: I have 900 photos online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lgordinho obtained with the P5100 (only the last 22 are from the SX50).
I got the SX50 on the 8th of November and my first impression, after a good look at the manual and some experimenting here in Lisbon, was of big disappointment! It looked like a toy built for people who enjoy the process of taking a picture more than outcome of the process (the picture itself). The face ID feature is especially illustrative of that (note that it distinguishes individual faces, not just human faces from other features): is this to play CSI, or what?! I wondered…
After fully reading this tread and having another look at the manual, I changed a lot of settings in the camera and went to the field to test it on the 20th. It was a day of clear sky and light wind, so good conditions for photography. In five hours spent in the field (8-13 AM), I managed to take about 450 pictures of 22 species (spp) and to spend my two batteries (the SX50 seems to be quite a battery drainer!).
Back home, I started by sorting the pictures in usable and unusable. My “usable” stands for providing a minimum of info about the bird to make it useful for ID purposes (a very low ambition). Imagine it was a mega rarity – any photo providing info would be “usable”. By that procedure, I estimated that, overall, about 75% of the pics were usable and 25% unusable. To get some more detail, after eliminating ca. 5% of misfires, I separated BIFs (Birds In Flight; n = 180, 16 spp) from other birds (n = 245, 12 spp) and obtained different values: 70% usable, 30% unusable for BIFs; and 90% usable, 10% unusable for other birds.
The next step was to select pictures that were good enough to deserve post-processing. Overall, I chose 11% of the pictures; 9% of the BIFs and 13% of the others. The last step was to select post-processed pics that, in my view, were suitable to have on-line. I chose 5% of the pics, with the same figure for BIFs and others. You can check my final selection on the above URL (I’ve attached three below as a teaser!).
So, what do these numbers mean for me, a birder with six years of digiscoping? Well, for one thing, the camera is great for BIFs! It can also produce good results with small birds, at very short distances (about 5 m away), in good light, but I still didn’t try any top speed species (like Yellow-browed Warbler). Overall, it does look like a good complement to digiscoping, but I’ll try to get back to you guys once I have more data.
For DSLR and telephoto lens owners wanting a higher magnification, make sure you know what the SX50 (and other super-zooms) can do. To summarize from the camera specifications and from previous posts, the 50x zoom (=1200/24) means it can go from 24 mm (0.48x) to 1200 mm (24x). You can multiply that by the 1.5x or the 2x internal teleconverter, to obtain a maximum magnification of 48x. In practice, this means that, at 100 m, you can´t get much better than this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lgordinho/10992406804
Whereas with my digiscoping kit (100x magnification), at 500 m, you can still do this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22705051@N08/2558316097
So before considering the SX50, make sure a super-zoom is really what you need.
Cheers and thanks for all the info about the SX50 - especially to crazyfingers, Roy C and IanF,
Luís G
I’m new to BirdForum and this is my 1st post.
The comments and tips about the SX50 HS I saw on BirdForum were one of the reasons for me to buy the SX50, so I kind of felt obliged to make this post. Not that I don’t enjoy posting on forums, but it does consume time that could be spent birding… or even working!
The first SX50 I tried was Jan Hillgård’s at Mellbystrand (Halland, Sweden) on the 5th of May. We were there with Anders Wirdheim et al. watching ca. 1000 Red-throated Divers migrating over Laholm Bay. I was impressed by what it could do, considering its price. Later, watching Jörgen Bernsmo using its Canon 7D and 400 mm f5.6 lens at Simrishamn (Skåne), almost made me give the big step and go into DSLR. In the end, back in Portugal, between the price, the bulk, the comments I read on this tread, and the opinions of several friends (notably Pedro “Malhúzia” Marques, Alexandre Vaz, Hans Larsson, Pedro Ramalho and António “Lucky Tony” Gonçalves), I went for the SX50.
Before I get into any kind of details regarding my impressions about the SX50, I think I should stress my background. I come from six years of digiscoping with a Zeiss 15-45x65 scope and a Nikon Coolpix P5100 camera. After sometime, I think I was getting pretty good results with this equipment, but you can judge for yourself: I have 900 photos online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lgordinho obtained with the P5100 (only the last 22 are from the SX50).
I got the SX50 on the 8th of November and my first impression, after a good look at the manual and some experimenting here in Lisbon, was of big disappointment! It looked like a toy built for people who enjoy the process of taking a picture more than outcome of the process (the picture itself). The face ID feature is especially illustrative of that (note that it distinguishes individual faces, not just human faces from other features): is this to play CSI, or what?! I wondered…
After fully reading this tread and having another look at the manual, I changed a lot of settings in the camera and went to the field to test it on the 20th. It was a day of clear sky and light wind, so good conditions for photography. In five hours spent in the field (8-13 AM), I managed to take about 450 pictures of 22 species (spp) and to spend my two batteries (the SX50 seems to be quite a battery drainer!).
Back home, I started by sorting the pictures in usable and unusable. My “usable” stands for providing a minimum of info about the bird to make it useful for ID purposes (a very low ambition). Imagine it was a mega rarity – any photo providing info would be “usable”. By that procedure, I estimated that, overall, about 75% of the pics were usable and 25% unusable. To get some more detail, after eliminating ca. 5% of misfires, I separated BIFs (Birds In Flight; n = 180, 16 spp) from other birds (n = 245, 12 spp) and obtained different values: 70% usable, 30% unusable for BIFs; and 90% usable, 10% unusable for other birds.
The next step was to select pictures that were good enough to deserve post-processing. Overall, I chose 11% of the pictures; 9% of the BIFs and 13% of the others. The last step was to select post-processed pics that, in my view, were suitable to have on-line. I chose 5% of the pics, with the same figure for BIFs and others. You can check my final selection on the above URL (I’ve attached three below as a teaser!).
So, what do these numbers mean for me, a birder with six years of digiscoping? Well, for one thing, the camera is great for BIFs! It can also produce good results with small birds, at very short distances (about 5 m away), in good light, but I still didn’t try any top speed species (like Yellow-browed Warbler). Overall, it does look like a good complement to digiscoping, but I’ll try to get back to you guys once I have more data.
For DSLR and telephoto lens owners wanting a higher magnification, make sure you know what the SX50 (and other super-zooms) can do. To summarize from the camera specifications and from previous posts, the 50x zoom (=1200/24) means it can go from 24 mm (0.48x) to 1200 mm (24x). You can multiply that by the 1.5x or the 2x internal teleconverter, to obtain a maximum magnification of 48x. In practice, this means that, at 100 m, you can´t get much better than this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lgordinho/10992406804
Whereas with my digiscoping kit (100x magnification), at 500 m, you can still do this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22705051@N08/2558316097
So before considering the SX50, make sure a super-zoom is really what you need.
Cheers and thanks for all the info about the SX50 - especially to crazyfingers, Roy C and IanF,
Luís G
Attachments
Last edited:
RafaelMatias
Unknown member
Hi Luís and of course welcome to Birdforum!
I think the comparison you make between the SX50 and digiscoping might be useful for some people, especially those thinking of buying this camera for recording distant (or very distant) birds/rarities. As I said to you in flickr I think distant objects are one of the weak points of this camera, as image quality decreases considerably when compared to the excellent job it does with closer subjects. Of course, this should not be unexpected. It's one of the cases when the expression "you get what you pay for" applies I guess. In any case, I'm more than happy with this camera as a whole, and it is infinitely better than my previous bridge, a Fuji S2500 in every respect. As you say, digiscoping beats the SX50 in reach. However, digiscoping needs to be applied to relatively static subjects in order to deliver acceptable results, it's a bit cumbersome to use (because all of the bits and pieces needed, which makes it a slower process, important when your bird might just fly) and importantly needs a tripod. So despite the SX50 relative limitations when it comes to very distant subjects, I still think this is an amazing and versatile piece of kit, especially useful if you want to walk/travel light and with as little volume as possible (when compared to all you need to take equivalent photos with a DSLR).
I started birding when cameras suitable for documenting birds were way out of my dreams, and so I documented everything by sketching/drawing. I still think that is among the best ways of documenting birds and of learning from direct observation. But despite this, I think the SX50 is a really good complement (and as such it does not replace a scope for lengthy detailed observations). Besides, it allows you to do more conventional photography (including macro), which I really used to enjoy when I had my SLR (which became obsolete with the digital era, but I never upgraded to a DSLR, and I probably wont). Still need to post some photos here! I've been using the settings shared by crazyfingers on post#389 (with minor modifications) which were of course very much appreciated!
Cheers
I think the comparison you make between the SX50 and digiscoping might be useful for some people, especially those thinking of buying this camera for recording distant (or very distant) birds/rarities. As I said to you in flickr I think distant objects are one of the weak points of this camera, as image quality decreases considerably when compared to the excellent job it does with closer subjects. Of course, this should not be unexpected. It's one of the cases when the expression "you get what you pay for" applies I guess. In any case, I'm more than happy with this camera as a whole, and it is infinitely better than my previous bridge, a Fuji S2500 in every respect. As you say, digiscoping beats the SX50 in reach. However, digiscoping needs to be applied to relatively static subjects in order to deliver acceptable results, it's a bit cumbersome to use (because all of the bits and pieces needed, which makes it a slower process, important when your bird might just fly) and importantly needs a tripod. So despite the SX50 relative limitations when it comes to very distant subjects, I still think this is an amazing and versatile piece of kit, especially useful if you want to walk/travel light and with as little volume as possible (when compared to all you need to take equivalent photos with a DSLR).
I started birding when cameras suitable for documenting birds were way out of my dreams, and so I documented everything by sketching/drawing. I still think that is among the best ways of documenting birds and of learning from direct observation. But despite this, I think the SX50 is a really good complement (and as such it does not replace a scope for lengthy detailed observations). Besides, it allows you to do more conventional photography (including macro), which I really used to enjoy when I had my SLR (which became obsolete with the digital era, but I never upgraded to a DSLR, and I probably wont). Still need to post some photos here! I've been using the settings shared by crazyfingers on post#389 (with minor modifications) which were of course very much appreciated!
Cheers
crazyfingers
Well-known member
I cant remember to be honest. I shoot in manual if the light is mostly constant or AV if not and always in raw, unless I use the tele converters as you have to use jpeg then.
Will get the exif details of my daughters laptop later and post em up :t:
