Recent Photos

[thewayne]

The first two shots were taken with my Canon Eos 6D, a full-frame DSLR with a 24-105mm zoom at the full 105mm setting. The first photo I'm posting because when viewed on a Windows system, it exhibits really cool Bokeh. Unfortunately on my Mac systems, it's much less evident. I find that curious.



I thought this was cute. Poor little monkey, all alone and sad.



I shot this on-campus yesterday. On Friday our school photographer told me about spotting an owl nest on-campus and showed me pix, including one of a baby on the ground. The curious thing was its right eye was totally clouded over: it was blind in one eye and our school is the state school for the blind! When Carla photographed it, the baby was lying on its left side. Somehow it got in to the tree, but again was lying on its left side, which makes me wonder if its left leg is injured. I don't know if the bird can fly, but it was not in the tree that the nest was in, it was one over.

This shot was taken with my pocket camera, a Panasonic Lumix LX7 zoomed to the 35mm equivalent of 105mm. I tried the digital zoom which was effectively 190ish mm, but it was a JPEG and the compression just ruined the sharpness of the image.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

That's one thing that rubbed me the wrong way with The Lobster, which we watched tonight - that hoary distinction between "people" and "animals". Really, that's still a thing? FSM knows, I can see pairs of buns together, or not-so-young buns trying to suckle off mother, in the most vivid display of acquiescence.. yes, we're very different species, but there's no hiding how much we have in common, even if humanity has lost that luxuriantly soft fur, or supremely perky ears.

And yep, the kind of clarity you get with a DSLR - well, the roomie had been using compacts for a while, and finally bought the D5500 kit I won recently. And he's been absolutely loving it - great even down to feeble indoor lighting, and even then, zoom in to 100%, and every pixel still counts, where the superzoom would be going 2MP mushy long ago. Maybe not such a different path from me, really - I started with a TZ5, but soon discovered its inherent limitations. As soon as I tried a coworker's new Sony DSLR, I knew that was where I needed to be heading. ^_^

Did you get into photography "seriously" back in the film days?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Before my sophomore year in high school, in 1977 I mowed lawns all summer long, in 110f weather in Phoenix, to buy my first camera, a Yashica MAT-124G. 120 roll film 6cm^2 negatives. I want to say it was $150ish. WONDERFUL camera. IMO, THE BEST camera for starting photographers because with the 12 exposures per 120 roll, you really had to pay attention to what you were doing.

I owned a couple of cheapie digital cameras, about ten years ago my wife bought me a Canon Digital Rebel, the first 6 MP model. A friend of mine was selling it pretty cheap. I was shooting Eos 35mm at the time, and a few of the lenses were cross-compatible.

Friday I dropped $600 on some more kit: a 75-300 image stabilized zoom and another body, an Eos SL1. It has the 1.6x crop factor, making the 300mm effectively a 480mm, and at 18 MP and the IS, it should produce good stuff. Our school graduation is next Friday, and I thought the 75-300 would be perfect for shooting it.

It's not a fantastic lens, but it'll be perfectly up to the task. What I want is a Sigma 150-600, but that's a cool $1,000. That's going to wait for a little while: it's possible the 75-300 will be adequate for a while.

Our school photographer spotted the baby owl a couple of days ago and it was upright, so whatever was causing it to favor leaning on its left seems to be resolved.