Photography

Equipment and Trade-Offs

Disclaimer : I am not a professional photographer or reviewer.  This page has information about my personal experiences with some of my digital photography equipment.  Your own experience may vary :-)  All photos on this page have been compressed for the web using JPEG lossy compression.

New Camera - Panasonic Lumix FZ-10

I picked this camera up from EBay as a Valentine's day 2004 gift for Melissa. Along with the camera I snagged a good fast 512MB SD card. As with any camera that uses SD, buy the largest and fastest SD card you can afford. The quality and speed of the SD cards vary quite a bit from brand to brand and model to model. Speed is definitely important here.

Two things I really like about this camera are the 12x Zoom and the image stabilizer. Because of those two things, the photos taken from it are a definite notch above what we could get from the Olympus with the OpticZoom. I personally also like the chunky feel and the easy controls.

The Macro on this camera also allows much closer close-ups than the macro mode on the Olympus. The time in between photos is much less, and the overall responsiveness, including zoom time, is much better.

One thing I do miss on this camera is a remote control. I use the remote on the Olympus a lot. I might pick up a remote shutter release to get those bird photos we both really want.

Old Camera - Olympus C3000Z

The C3000Z is our second digital camera. The first was a casio that was maybe 1/3 megapixel or so. The camera has good optics and takes good photographs. Better versions have since come out, but this is still a decent camera.

We still have this camera. Typically it is only used as a backup, or for jobs where the camera might get dirty (such as when I photograph my woodworking projects in my dusty workshop).

Birding Lens - EagleEye OpticZoom with Olympus 1.45x

With the purchase of the Panasonic FZ-10, we no longer use the OpticZoom. However, I have kept the information below in case anyone else is evaluating this lens.

If you want to photograph birds, you need something with a lot of zoom to it. Since the camera only has a 3x zoom, it is completely inadequate by itself for most bird photography. Right now, the zoom I use is the EagleEye OpticZoom. It doesn't have very good optics, but they are passable, and decent for the price. It's something that you'll probably quickly outgrow, however.

I usually use the OpticZoom with an Olympus 1.45x lens attached.  When you combine the 3x zoom of the camera, the 5x zoom of the OpticZoom and the 1.45x zoom of the additional lens, you get approximately 21.75x zoom.

If I manage to save up the money for it, I plan to get something like a Swarovsky scope instead. The optics in those simply can't be beat, but once you get what you need, you're out about $2000. The problem with the OpticZoom and similar monoculars (and inexpensive spotting scopes) is the chromatic aberration you get in any photograph with high contrast backgrounds. Chromatic aberration is the breakdown of colors around the edge of a subject. This is usually seen as a magenta or blue outline around the subject.

Another problem is with vignetting. Vignetting is the darkening of the corners around the image. In the most severe cases, vignetting cause the image to be circular in the middle with black edges. With the C3000Z at full zoom, the vignetting isn't bad unless you increase the f-stop above 2.8.

Here's a photo showing what chromatic aberration looks like.  If you, like me, intend to photograph birds in the sky or in trees, this can be a real problem. The image has been resized to approximately 35% of its original size.  Photo was taken with the opticzoom with an Olympus 1.45x lens attached to the end (the Olympus lens does not add any additional aberration as best as I can tell)

Here's another example of the aberration.  This image has been resized to about 25% of its original size.  Photo was taken with the opticzoom with an Olympus 1.45x lens attached to the end (the Olympus lens does not add any additional distortion as best as I can tell)

Here's a close-up of that same image showing some of the distortion.  Image is at 100% original size.  You can also see some of the grainyness you get with the OpticZoom combined with jpeg compression.

If you can avoid high-contrast photos such as those above, you can still get decent results, especially considering that the OpticZoom is 10x less than the spotting scope.  Here's a decent unmodified shot (it looks better once sharpened) of a cardinal in a holly tree.  You can still see the aberration in the background and around the edges of the bird, but it is more tolerable.

Here's what the Olympus 1.45x lens looks like

Other Lenses - Tiffen

The Tiffen accessory lenses (I have the wide-angle and 2x zoom) are decent cheap consumer lenses. If you visit my birds pages and look at the close-up photo of the female hummingbird, those photos were taken with the Tiffen 2x attached to the C3000Z

Here's a photo taken with the Tiffen 2x and the Olympus C3000Z at full zoom (effective zoom is apx 6x).  Distance from subject was about two feet, and the camera was set to manual focus with an fstop around 4.  The photo below has not been resized, but it has been cropped.