Nature Photography March 13, 2011

Today was about experimenting with my camera. My most recent camera is a Pentax K7 DSLR that I got last year. I wanted a Pentax DSLR so I could use my older Pentax lenses that I purchased back in my 35mm film days. Today I used my old Pentax 80-200 zoom with a matched 2x multiplier. Though It looks that I am pretty close to my subject matter I must say that I did use the crop feature of the camera to provide the images displayed.

It has been several weeks now but I am happy that the birds are back in town. I hope that is a good sign that Spring is around the corner. I have had enough of Winter.

Even the squirrel came out to look around for food. I need to get a handful of nuts and toss them out for the locals. Yes they dig around a bit but I am ok with that.

As usual I am glad that the sun was out today. I know, I know, Mom always told me not to look directly into the sun. However, this photo was taken with the sun behind a cloud. It was a cloud that was transparent enough to filter the brightness and to provide an interesting effect.

The photos above were also edited a bit in Photoshop using the curves adjustment. except the image of the sun. I am looking forward to taking more pictures as time permits.

What I learned today was that because it was cloudy I needed to kick up my ISO setting in order to capture the color I obtained and a usable shutter speed. As many of us know, when you kick up the ISO it also adds more grain to the image so as the images are zoomed in on and cropped there is more grain in the image.

I also took a look at the White Balance adjustment of the camera.afterward I took my pictures. I may have altered that a bit to get better colors, that is something I will have to tinker with a bit more in the future.

When it comes to film vs. digital, let's face it, I would not have posted these pictures so quickly to share them with you. Scanning film negatives or prints would have lost out to more grain when I finished cropping the images and I would have been a bit disappointed in the outcome. Digital pretty much provides more options for me that I had been used to with film so for todays pictures I am pleased with digital.