Law Park Pond – Part 2

by Posted in Wildlife & Animals Leave a comment
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In an earlier post (See: Law Park Pond) I wrote about how I had failed miserably at getting pictures of damselflies on a nearby pond.

In that post I mentioned that I thought the reasons I had failed were:

  • I had the wrong camera/lens. But then this begs the question: what would be the right camera/lens? And in any case that was the only camera I had with me.
  • Because of the above I couldn’t get close enough (unless I wanted to wade into the pond) and had to crop too much thus reducing quality.
  • The camera was certainly able to focus on, and capture what I wanted, but I couldn’t react fast enough.
  • Perhaps a better approach would have been to wait until one of them landed on a nearer reed. I should have been more patient and waited longer.

I also wrote that I would:

… go back with a better camera/lens and hope that a higher resolution sensor (to facilitate cropping) will help. I’ll also take a lens with more reach. I’ll try to be more patient. It’s also clear that I need to practice taking pictures of fast-moving insects.

Today I went back and tried again, this time with a camera with a 33-megapixel full frame sensor (the camera in the earlier post had a 20-megapixel 1″ sensor) and a 28-300mm zoom used mostly at 300mm (the other camera had a 24-200mm lens used mostly at 200mm).

This made a big difference and I’m much happier with the results. I’m now fairly confident that I can get a decent picture of a damselfly when it has landed. What I’m still unable to do is get a picture of one in flight. I tried but they’re quite small, incredibly fast in flight and really hard (almost impossible for me at the moment) to capture. So, I’ll need to do some reading to try to get some tips on how to do this. And I’ll have to practice more.

I’ll keep trying.

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Taken with a Sony A7IV and Tamron 28-300mm f/4-7.1 Di III VC VXD lens.

Law Park Pond

by Posted in Landscapes, Wildlife & Animals Leave a comment
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Although I’m on vacation at the moment I had to pass by the Historical Society where I volunteer to do something urgent. I was there for only a few minutes and after I’d finished, I decided to go and sit by the pond in Law Memorial Park, which is right next to where I volunteer.

I chose to sit on a bench right next to the pond and was surprised and disappointed to find that all around the bench were plastic plates, plastic knives and forks and a number of crushed soda cans. It was particularly disappointing because there was a garbage container only about 20 feet away. Why do people do this? Anyway, I picked up the garbage and put it in the garbage container and went back to the bench to read my book.

I guess I went there in the hope of seeing birds. I used to see birds here: Green Herons, Blue Herons, Egrets, Cormorants etc., but nowadays I hardly see any. I wonder why?

After reading for a while I noticed a large number of damsel flies (I think) buzzing around the reeds in the pond. I got out my camera and spent some time trying to get a picture or two. This proved to be difficult because they move so quickly, and I couldn’t really get close to them.

What I did get was a number of terrible pictures (although I’ve noticed that if you view the pictures on a phone they don’t look as bad as they do on a high-resolution monitor), which I’m sharing here because it’s good, from time to time, to share your failures as well as your successes.

So, what went wrong. This is my thinking at the moment:

  • I had the wrong camera/lens. But then this begs the question: what would be the right camera/lens? And in any case that was the only camera I had with me.
  • Because of the above I couldn’t get close enough (unless I wanted to wade into the pond) and had to crop too much thus reducing quality.
  • The camera was certainly able to focus on, and capture what I wanted, but I couldn’t react fast enough.
  • Perhaps a better approach would have been to wait until one of them landed on a nearer reed. I should have been more patient and waited longer.

I’ll go back with a better camera/lens and hope that a higher resolution sensor (to facilitate cropping) will help. I’ll also take a lens with more reach. I’ll try to be more patient. It’s also clear that I need to practice taking pictures of fast-moving insects.

I guess we’ll see how it goes.

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Taken with a Sony RX100 VII.