Sunday, March 04, 2012

Just prowling around

Yesterday afternoon was nice, but today outdid itself.  25 degrees this morning, but 60 this afternoon according to the thermometer on my porch.  I went out to prowl around and see if anything had been moving around.

Melting snow and water running everywhere, and lots of mud.  A couple of deer ran across the road in front of me before I left the pavement, but they didn’t even slow down.  No chance for photos or video there.  I even saw some ground squirrels out and about; a sure sign of spring.  Lots of deer tracks in the snow and I found a couple of fox tracks and a coyote track, but they were old melted out tracks and I didn’t bother trying to call them in.  I finally found a couple of deer didn’t spook at the sight of me.

Unfortunately they were in considerable shade and didn’t show up as well as I would have liked, but when photographing wildlife sometimes you take what you can get.  I’m still learning the ropes with the new camera, and this was a good opportunity to try out the optical qualities of the zoom lens.

There are 3 settings for the lens.  The first setting is for 10X optical zoom.  The second setting is for 40X digital zoom, and the third is for 200X digital zoom.  Digital telephoto is seldom as good as optical.  I first shot a short sequence at 10X optical zoom, but it was a long reach for the lens, and no chance to approach closer.  I quickly switched to 40X digital, but didn’t use full power.  Looking at the finished results, it isn’t quite as sharp as the footage shot with the optical feature, but acceptable.  Good enough.







I went on and let Bear run ahead of the truck to stretch his legs for awhile until I reached an especially snowy corner.  Someone else had turned around there, so not wanting to push my luck I did the same.  We went back down the road to a wide spot and stopped for lunch, then poked along home without sighting anything more of interest.    

1 comment:

Momlady said...

Glad to see you back. It's been quite a while.