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2 August 2006 (cont.) While I've been away Vesna has emailed from Croatia to say that she and Mladen think they have found where the Tawny Owl pictured here has his/her nest. A very pale breast feather from nearby suggests it may the same bird. Of course I hope that they will sieze the opportunity to get some pics next spring! More details when I get back as Vesna has sent a lot of interesting pics. 10 Aug: New info and pics are in the Owl Gallery page 7.
10 August After an increasingly frustrating time with my Nikon Coolpix 4300 this summer I've bitten the bullet and bought a Panasonic Lumix FZ30. My problem with the Coolpix is the autofocus system, which simply cannot cope with many of the situations in which I use it. Set it to macro for a beetle or flower and it doggedly focuses on the ground way below. Fill 80% of the screen with an owl three feet away and it finds a nice sharp line somewhere at the side to fix on. Trouble is that line may be 25 feet away. In the woods it can't cope with the tangle of branches or leaves and all too often misfocuses. The between-shots time can be agonising. And I've missed I don't know how many good pics because of shutter delay. My next choice, the Panasonic FZ30, is a controversial camera because of the CCDs used in this series. There's much discussion of their noisiness. Having looked at numerous photo samples I've decided it's not the biggest problem in the world and can be dealt with in post-processing if necessary. This can be a chore, but I mess around a lot with my digital pics anyway. I'm definitely not buying the new FZ50 as Panasonic has responded to the criticism about the noisy sensor by applying a sledgehammer filter which, imho, ruins the output of this otherwise fine camera. What attracted me to the FZ series initially was the number of users who enthuse about it. What I like about the FZ30 is (1) its Leica lens, (2) the big optical zoom, and (3) its SLR-like feel and handling. Zooming is entirely manual, and with the camera in manual mode you focus using the knurled ring on the barrel. During focusing (auto or manual) the centre of the viewfinder image is magnified so you can see what's happening. I call that bliss. On top of all that it's got image stabilisation, which apparently works well. The 35 mm camera-equivalent focal length range is 35 to 420 mm -- i.e. moderate wide angle to long zoom. There's something called extended zoom that goes to 15.3x and 19x if you set smaller picture sizes (5 and 3 Mpx). This is true optical magnification, it looks impressive in the examples I've seen and is clearly quite usable. The 19.1x zoom is equivalent to having a 670-mm lens on a 35-mm camera. So, the Leica lens looks promising and is almost as good at full zoom as at normal focal lengths. There's the usual problem with distant foliage, but that seems to be partly to do with trying to fit irregular organic shapes on to square pixels and is a generic digital camera problem -- the digital SLRs don't seem to do all that much better. I'm looking forward to trying this camera out in what's left of the summer! My "review" of this camera plus all test pics have now gone to the FZ30 page in the Equipment section. | ||||||||||||||
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Nikon Coolpix 4300 -- into the bin. | The 8 Mpx Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ30K (where K means black) -- into the field from tomorrow. This pic gives no idea how long the barrel of the lens is -- in fact it sticks out 3.5 inches (9 cm) from the body of the camera. The camera back is approx 5" wide and the depth of lens + back is also 5". It doesn't go in a pocket! | |||||||||||||
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