The Colorado State Open Thread is dedicated to the people of Koslandia who have an interest in, home in or just general knowledge about our squarish state of Colorado. Please contribute your thoughts about whatever is on your mind down below, and we’ll hopefully be able to share our state with each other and perhaps with people who are from other areas.
Well, this is a last minute diary. I have been staying up until the wee morning hours since Thanksgiving, doing research and trying to decide if I wanted to upgrade my camera system. This is a want-to activity rather than a need-to activity; you have been able to enjoy (I hope) my photos that I’ve been taking for the last several years with my “Superzoom” cameras that have had built-in large zoom lenses. I started, IIRC, with a Canon camera with a 10x lens, then went to a Fuji camera with a 30x lens, then a Canon again with a 50x lens and the last one I have been using is a Nikon P900 camera which has an 83x lens. These magnifications are all “Optical” and not digital, meaning the lens doesn’t do anything other than adjust itself to the proper orientation but it doesn’t use “Digital” manipulation of the image to achieve a larger picture of the subject. I can, and do, crop pictures using basic software on my computer if I want to zero in on a subject, but when I do that, I am not gaining any more pixels of the subject — I’m just eliminating pixels that I don’t want.
These various cameras have been able to stand the test of time and I have enjoyed having them. There have been, however, a number of frustrations with them that have kept me from fully enjoying photography as one of my favorite hobbies, and I finally reached the point where I am going to try and do something about them.
One of the major frustrations is that I have not been able, with any of these cameras, to take photos of the stars, milky way or even photos of relatively dark scenes. My current camera has a rating for the lens of f/2.8-6.5, which is actually relatively good for some of the lenses, but for taking pictures in low to starlight conditions, there’s just no way that the camera was going to be able to pick up enough light to get an image of whatever I was aiming at. For example, I tried to get images of the comet this last spring/summer, which I could plainly see in the sky, but all of my pictures were solid black. This was a combination of the lens not allowing much light in, the sensor inside the camera being probably as small as that within a cell phone from a few years ago and the additional problem that I couldn’t keep the shutter open to take the picture long enough for what little light could reach the sensor to make enough of an image to show up.
The other major frustration with all of these cameras has been the autofocus. I have not learned enough about photography to know how to manipulate the exposure settings or the size of the opening of the lens but I have learned how to use the autofocus as best as can be done. Which, actually, is pretty hard. The autofocus likes to take the first object it sees and focus on that, which, since I am often trying to photograph birds or nature scenes, is not the object that’s closest to me.
This photo, which I really was hoping would turn out, is well-focused on the leaves that are in front of the squirrel. None of my cameras allowed me to focus precisely on the subject like my old film camera would and the autofocus that I have now, for example, has a grid of up to nine squares on the viewfinder. If the subject is highlighted within any of the squares, that portion of the subject will be in focus. Usually. However, the autofocus won’t even display most of the squares — it may display one, or three, or scatter four around the screen, and it seems like pot luck about what may be in focus and I may have to play around trying to improve where all is in focus. This is very frustrating and I miss a number of shots just because they’re not focused properly.
Last week on Black Friday, I started researching various cameras and I contacted Mike’s Cameras, a store that is one of the best here in Colorado (it has changed names at least twice over the years) and was steered towards a Sony camera, the A7c, which also steered me towards the Sony line of lenses. Today, on Cyber Monday, after having spent multiple nights up until 5 AM or so watching online reviews, some instructional videos and clicking around multiple websites, I settled on that camera and two lenses, plus some accompanying items like a new camera bag, new memory cards and some additional items to flesh out the whole “kit and kaboodle”. I will be showing you photos in the future using the new setup and I’m still planning on using the P900 since the lens is so powerful, so we’ll get a chance to compare photos. In the meantime, I forgot to include the following last week among all the animal photos. These were down along US 34 in the Big Thompson Canyon.
I look forward to new pictures. What’s on your minds tonight? The floor is yours...