April 20, 2008
Hooray!
I haven’t been able to go birding in a while, but to my surprise the birds came to me this weekend when a female Northern Flicker showed up in my yard! It only stayed a day – and was EXTREMELY jittery. As a result, my pictures weren’t good enough to post or print, but they were good enough to ID the flicker.
My boyfriend recently gave me a copy of Digital Nature Photography: The Art and the Science. I’m reading through it and so far I like more parts than I dislike (some of the writing drags on at times and can get repetitive), but overall it seems to be a very helpful and useful book. I’ve been trying out some of the techniques, but I think I need to learn more about what my camera does and CAN do. For example – I have a canon s3 IS, and it seems to automatically save images as a JPEG file. The book mentions RAW files but I don’t know how to get my camera to do that yet – I really need to study the manual. I’m also having a frustrating time with trying to focus the camera – it’ll look like I’ve got my subject in focus, but when I view the picture, it turns out I was really focused on the grass blades right behind it. So I go to manual focus but my subject moves away before I’m ready.
I often make it a point to mention that I’m new to birding, but I’m also really new to photography – I’ve only had a camera for a year. It’s a fun learning journey though. Hope to see lots of good birds / animals soon.
