This morning was no different except that I had a camera with me that could get the shot. As I rounded the corner, I heard him pecking away. I looked up, saw that his back was to me, so I had to wait. As this was near the end of my walk and the morning was getting warm, I was dripping a bit with sweat and had to stand in the sunshine and be patient. Fortunately, he was in the mood for moving around and soon scooted around to the back of the tree, completely out of sight. Gee, thanks! More patience …

Eventually, he came around to the side and I moved to the same side and we were able to get our photo session going. We kept the session going for a few minutes while he moved around, posed, moved some more, posed some more and I … well, I sweated.

Finally, a lady and her dog came down the sidewalk, but they were very polite, waiting until I finished my “set”. There were really no worries about frightening the bird off, though I appreciated the gesture, because he was about 50 – 60 feet in the air, well out of reach of the dog and probably most cats.

I’m sure that I’ll be having more photos of this guy as well as the local rabbit population. It sure is an interesting neighborhood if you look around.

Joe, for the most part, is part of my morning ‘routine’. That is, I see him most every morning while he and I are out doing our walks. He’s always happy to see Hobbs and gives him a nice rub on the head.

Occasionally, we’ll see him walking his daughter’s two schnauzers, Ginger and Fred. Hobbs like to stop for a sniff-fest when they are around.

On this particular morning, as you can see, it was very foggy. So foggy, in fact, that Joe didn’t see us across the street. I waved, but he didn’t respond. I’m pretty sure that Hobbs didn’t see him either.

Of course, I love fog and I thought that this was a nice, moody shot.

“Now! Make sure dat when we stop that you try some conch. Dat’s a shellfish, available only in da Bahamas. Here, we locals call it Bahamian Viagra. It’s guaranteed to add ten years to ya life and ten years to ya sex life! It’s an all-natural aphrodisiac!”
~Biggie

Our driver, ‘Biggie’ touted. Our first stop on the city tour took us to a small street with vendors flanking us on either side of the bus. Before Biggie opened the doors, he let us know that a lady was coming aboard, who needed no microphone. Indeed he was correct. We had no trouble hearing her!!! None at all. She was there to tell us how hot it was outside and how one of her cool Bahamian specialty drinks would cool you off on such a hot day as this.

After she finished her spiel, we got off the bus. Right there in front of us, not surprisingly was a place that sold conch, fried, soup, or salad. As we had only 30 minutes, Deb and I stepped up to the counter and orders a salad. I’d had one before, long ago, and knew that I liked conch.

The lady doing then preparing was very sweet and engaging; you could tell that she loved her work. She asked me what was my name and then told me to come around the corner to see how the conch was prepared. First, she asked: if I show you how it’s done, are you going to still eat it? I said: of course!

She grabbed one of the shells and the conch retreated back into the shell in response to the movement. Did I mention that this was FRESH?!!!

She picked up her hammer, I, my camera. She adjusted the hammer, claw side toward the shell and struck the shell. Next, she took a knife, inserted it into the new opening and cut the conch free and pulled it out. Then, step by step, she have us instructions on how to remove the ‘digger’, which is used for jewelry, the eyes, the guts, and the skin, leaving a nice hunk of white meat for the salad. The rest of the pieces are used for fishing, the skin for soup. No part goes unused. I could appreciate that.

That done, she cut the meat into small cubes, added onion, tomato, juice from a lime, juice from an orange, some hot pepper, and a little salt. Then, served it up in a large styrofoam cup. Yummy!

She practically demanded that we have a beer with it and told us where to buy it. We went across the street, bought a local beer, Sands, then came back, ate our salad, talk a bit more, then we were off.

It was a pleasant 30 minutes. I could have sat there all day, talked, laughed, and had fun.

Gratitude is like a flashlight, it lights up what is already there. You don’t necessarily have anything more or different, but suddenly you can actually see what is. And because you can see, you no longer take it for granted.
M.J. Ryan – Attitudes of Gratitude

Quite frankly, there are those moments when I am simply ‘there’, filled with gratitude.

This was the scene, Saturday morning, just off of the coast of West Palm Beach, FL. Taken from the aft (rear) deck of The Bahamas Celebration cruise ship as we returned home.

When Deb and I returned from our cruise, we went to the zoo the next day. I was toting the Nikon P-510 with me, figuring, quite correctly, that I’d be able to make good use of the 1000mm zoom lens.

Throughout the time that we were there, I shot with it at maximum zoom, as much as I could. Happily, it never let me down. There were times when I had to be realllllllllyyyy patient with the zoom because the conditions were somewhat dark and the zoom tends to ‘hunt’ in low-contrast situations. Also, something else that I need to be careful with is low-light situations. The camera has a fantastic vibration reduction mode; however, shooting at 1/15 second at 1000 mm is not advised, though I was able to pull of some of those shots. I should have moved up the ISO or gone with auto-ISO so that I could have gotten better shutter speeds. I had to delete quite a few due to blurriness because of low shutter speeds. With sensors this small, depth of field is rarely a decision. However, at 1000 mm, you still get a fairly shallow DOF.

I thought that I’d share a few of those pictures here. The cool thing to note here is that two of the photos were shot through a chain-link fence: The tiger and the eagle. The Komodo Dragon was shot through glass. The AF had no problem with either situation.

The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Canadian portion of the Plains is known as the Prairies. Some geographers include some territory of Mexico in the Plains, but many stop at the Rio Grande.
WikiPedia

Having lived in Dallas, TX for 20 years, which is part of The Great Plains, I can say that I have absolutely no love for The Plains! There is nothing there but horizon! It’s great for farming, as there are no trees to get in your way.

As a photographer, I find photographing in the plains to be difficult, because the place does not move me. It offers nothing that excites me.

Now, if you’ll allow, I’ll break landscape photography into a few, very broad categories, ordered by my preference.

1. Forest/Woods
2. Desert/Southwestern
3. Mountains
4. Coastal
5. Prairie/Plains
6. Polar

I realize that these are pretty wide. I’ve done photography in each of these categories, or perhaps zones. My favorite is forest/woods. There seems to be a calming influence in a place full of rivers, streams, birds, different types of animals, and lots of trees. I can spend hours here and never tire of it.

Second on the list, the desert, or perhaps more accurately, the high desert, where most of the colors are browns, reds, and yellows. There you get to see dunes, bluffs, buttes, mountains, arroyos, cactus, and a wide array of desert flowers and plants. There seems to be always something interesting. However, I don’t know if I could spend my life there, living in that environment every day.

Third – Mountains: This was really hard as mountains and desert are probably really tied at 2nd place, perhaps on certain days, they even gravitate to first place. I just love the power and majesty of the mountains, the spirit of the desert. They both inspire me to shoot, shoot, shoot!

Coming in fourth, coastal. This is one that I have difficulty shooting, sometimes. Though it could be argued that this environment is the most dynamic, as the beach is always changing, second by second with each successive wave, it doesn’t seem to hold my interest very long. I see myself moving further away from the beach and coming back inland to explore greener spaces. I’m thankful for the time that I got to live in Charleston, SC – that gave me an entire 19 months to see if I really liked that type of photography and to explore it in depth, but it doesn’t move me so much.

Numbers 5 and 6 could be swapped, as I have no idea about shooting polar landscapes, though I would imagine that it would be somewhat similar to desert landscapes, but with blues and whites and a whole lot colder!

As I think about the trip to NE, probably in August, of course I will take a camera with me, but I’m just wondering what I will photograph, out there in those wide open spaces. It’s a long drive between here and there, some 23 hours, passing through some of the least picturesque parts of the country. I’m thinking that, maybe, just maybe, I’ll head on up to Mount Rushmore, South Dakota and to Badlands, since I’m up that way, but then again, after driving 23 hours over so many days, another 8 hour drive seems quite unpalatable!

This will be a challenge to photograph in places that don’t necessarily move me.

Bird on a wire @1000mm

I’ll admit that when I saw that Nikon had a camera that had a zoom on it from 24-1000mm, I thought: I’d love to give that a try!!! I waited around for LensRentals.com to come up with one, but they didn’t, so I had to take matters in my own hands. The FedEx guy dropped it off yesterday.

Last evening, I spent two hours and 265 shots, down in McDowell Nature Preserve trying the camera out. Seeing if I could run it’s battery out, take it through its paces, and see what it was about. Currently, it is on sale for $399 with free shipping. B&H was out of stock, so I bought one from Adorama.

Without further ado, here are my thoughts:

Viewfinder -

The P510 has an electronic viewfinder. Well, I remember having an electronic viewfinder on my DiMage A1 – 8 years ago. This viewfinder, from what I can remember of the old one, seems to be about the same quality – fairly crappy. C’mon Nikon, you can do much better than this! I used the Nikon 1 V1 and it had a very good EVF. This, although significantly less expensive, is a huge step down. It’s usable, but tiny and the resolution is not very high. Further, there is no sensor to switch between the EVF and the screen, which the A1 had, as well as the Nikon V1. The switch is done manually with a button on the back. Seems that it would have been easy to include this on the camera.

Charging and battery life
There is no separate charger. There is a small brick that comes with the camera that you plug into the wall, plug one end of your USB cable into it, the other end into the camera. The battery cannot be charged by itself. I don’t know if Nikon provides a separate charger for the battery, but this ties the camera up while the battery is charging. If you have two batteries, you cannot leave one to charge while using the camera. You have to wait!
As for battery life, I’ve seen reports that it lasts about 250 shots or so. I used the camera for two hours, solid, shot 260 shots and the battery was not fully charged. I’d say that it lasts quite a bit longer then that. My battery meter was still showing full.

Manual Focusing
Forget about it! The viewfinder, in my opinion, doesn’t have enough resolution to do accurate focusing. I suppose one could focus on the rear viewfinder, which is very clean and of pretty high resolution.
GPS
Not all that accurate. Some of the shots had GPS coordinates that seemed remarkably accurate, others were off several hundred feet. No rhyme nor reason. All were taken under open sky. Also, where other GPS’s might work, this one has trouble unless under open sky. Even amongst the trees, it didn’t pick up a signal, where my hand-held GPS had no problems.
Zoom
Killer. I mean, seriously, 24 – 1000 mm! This was the reason that I got the camera. For that reach! At 1000 mm, as one might expect, camera shake is HUGE, but the VR does a great job at allowing me to shoot at slow shutter speeds, hand-held.
Auto-Focus
OK, it’s a $400 camera. I’m trying hard not to compare it to my D700, or even D300. The auto-focus is a bit slow and has quite a bit of trouble, sometimes, locking on at 1000mm, unless there is a great amount of contrast on the subject or between the subject and the background. However, as you can see from some of the photos, it works well and is delivers a very clean, acceptably sharp photo, even at maximum zoom.

Ergonomics
It’s a Nikon and they’ve got ergonomics solidly. The camera feels good in your hand. Buttons are positioned in places that make sense, and the meaning system seems very familiar, very similar to the V1.
RAW
No Raw – This doesn’t bother me in the least. Heck, it’s a P&S camera.
Shooting Formats
Finally, I love the different formats available 4:3, 3;2, 16:9, 1:1. I shot the whole 2 hours in square format. It was cool not to have to turn the camera on the side.

I’ve not tried out the 1080p HD video, just yet. Maybe when I go to The Bahamas I’ll try it out. Maybe not.

This camera, even with its faults, makes a fantastic walking around camera, or even in -the-woods camera. I’m sure that I’ll be posting more critter shots, soon. Also, it has 30 or 60 FPS shooting! I’ve yet to try this out … yet!

Well, this is a first. I have no beaver photos in my archives. Now I have a few! I was taking some photos of a squirrel and heard some noise down the hill in the pond. After a beat of looking, I finally spotted him. I zoomed in, took a few shots, and then he moved on.

I was zoomed all the way out to max, 1000 mm. Considering that this guy was probably a couple of hundred yards away, not bad at all and this is hand-held @ 1/25 of a second! Thank you VR!!!

More later …

To

1,000 mm
Is quite the stretch. I assure you that this is the same stop sign that is at the end of the block, circled in red. Taken from about a block away.

More later.

I was probably about 6 or 8 feet away from him by the time that I noticed him. I came to a dead stop, pulled my Canon S90 out of my pocket, and took about 6 shots. Mind you, this shot is not cropped much and the S90 has only a 3.2x optical zoom, so to get this much detail, I had to be pretty close.

The rabbit’s response to danger is to stand absolutely still and try to blend in with the surroundings; For a photographer, this is a dream come true. He did just that, stood absolutely still, letting me take a few photos as I inched closer and closer, taking photos all the while. Eventually, I got too close and he decided that it was better to run than remain still.

Thanks guy! I hope that I didn’t disturb your breakfast too much!