Between the last post and this one I had made another purchase. It wasn’t for another lens, but give it time. This time it was for future portability and ease. Plus I like spending money.
I picked up a new laptop, specifically for on the go editing. It was just as fast and powerful as the big “gaming” laptop I picked up the year or two before. But it was small, and thin. Oh so thin. It’s got a touch screen and a pen, so I can edit with that which for me is really helpful. The majority of these blogs are written on that laptop. And all my editing. I did a lot of research on it for the past few weeks or months before it dipped in price on Amazon and I snagged it. About $200 cheaper than the exact same thing is going for almost a year later.
But enough about that, it doesn’t really affect the photography so much as the workflow afterwards.
This Saturday evening I went somewhere new, still to the same river though. (The Chattahoochee is huge)
There I saw plenty of wildlife. More waterfowl in one place than ever before. And yet, no pictures were edited out of this raw folder. Hundreds taken, not a single one edited. I didn’t remember why until I imported the folder and started editing them now for the post.
To keep it brief, missing focus, not being close enough, not understanding the 1-1 ratio for lens length and shutter speed. Etc.
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/1000 Sec - F8.0 - ISO 800
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @ 256 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 800
Turns out I did see a kingfisher first much earlier than I thought. I couldn’t even tell what it was back then, I only know now because I’ve managed to see one with much better skills and equipment and I was actually able to identify it.
This next one isn’t too bad, but to be fair that is at the full resolution. If I cropped it in like I wanted to, it’s not looking great then.
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @400 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 500
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @400 - 1/640 Sec - F8 - ISO 800
Look the sun went behind a cloud and now the bird is blue. I’ve discovered an entirely new type of bird. The blue Egret.
Jokes aside I may be able to edit this back to natural colors. But it’s just not worth it. It’s not a particularly interesting photo, even if the bird was colored correctly.
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @309 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 800
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/400 Sec - F8 - ISO 500
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/800 Sec - F8 - ISO 1600
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @ 150 - 1/160 Sec - F8 - ISO 1250
I hand picked out the “best” ones for these examples. Really it comes down to inexperience and trying to get top quality photos out of the bottom entry level equipment. I know gear doesn’t make the photographer, to an extent. You’re not going to get a nice full resolution clean and crisp photo of the details of a wildlife subject shooting on the cheapest lens available.
It was terribly disappointing to come back to hundreds of images like the ones above and feeling like a failure. Especially when hopes were so high that day from all the different kinds of wildlife I saw in a single outing. That does explain why I didn’t edit anything from this day.
However, to try and end on a better note. That same morning of the 17th I did take a picture from right out my front door.
Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @375 - 1/60 Sec - F8 - ISO 400
A Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, the only one I’ve ever seen so far. Pretty cool, and that picture still came out better. Get closer to the subject was really what I needed for the types of photos I wanted. That and a faster autofocus, bigger aperture… Things that cost money.