Gone Digital

I still used the film camera sparingly while visions of digital cameras danced in my head – that was while I was even wide awake! Finally, I could not hold off any longer and took the old photographers’ leap from film to digital SLR. It was after all my birthday, so why not give myself a present. So off to Canoga Camera my wife and I went. The salesperson was indeed friendly and helpful. Of course per recommendation, I chose the Canon 300D kit (which included the 18-55mm lens) then the current rage in digital SLRs. When the salesperson asked which body color I wanted - Silver or Black, and being the Silas Marner that I am, I chose Silver because it costs $20 less. (Bad choice – Silver reflects light and that would surely bother my bird subjects and, besides, Black looks more “professional”). There I went: bad bird photographer right off the bat.

I kept my son’s 70-300 zoom and used that with my 300D for my venture into digital bird photography. The gentleman was right, I could see my shots almost instantly. What it meant was that now it won’t take me a week to find out how bad a bird photographer I was! Somehow I was using my new camera like it was a film camera – that is, I was very selective with my shots as if I do not want to waste any frame with a bad shot. I cannot even use up a 512MB Compact Flash card in a half a day’s session, shooting in jpeg at that! For me the subject must be in a good pose before I click on the shutter button. Now bear in mind that I’m shooting birds, creatures of constant motion. And even when my subject cooperated and posed for a while, the pictures still came out soft (a photography term to indicate that the subject is not sharp, as in the edges are “soft”). The results of my endeavors have been consistently of poor quality. It kept me pondering what could be wrong. Frustration was beginning to nag me.