Birds in our garden

LaFoto · Jan 6, 2006

With me it just does not work... either my sister's 28-200mm lens is actually more defective than I wanted to believe, or I just cannot hold 1/10 or 1/20 seconds with the lens fully extended, or it is just not good enough to photograph through the window, or whatever, but my attempts to photograph the birds in our garden all came out as bloopers

At first I had even set the white balance to "tungsten", but that could be corrected somewhat, while the blurriness can not...

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These are crops from a larger frame, and this is the absolute closest I can get to them. How do others do it to get crystal clear, brilliantly sharp very close close-ups of birds? :scratch:

And the rest for you to laugh:

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immski · Jan 6, 2006

I don't think that it is that you cannot hold the lens still as the grass in 2 and 3 seem to be rather crisp. Did the camera perhaps auto focus there instead?

LaFoto · Jan 7, 2006

Well, my sister bought herself a new zoom lens because something was no longer all right with this one. So when my own zoom lens acted up, she said, take mine, it might still be better than yours. She warned me that in some area it would no longer focus properly. I thought I might circumvent that problem by focussing manually instead of letting the camera do the job.
As it seems, the problems are a) more there than I had cared to believe, and b) are also there when I try to focus manually: the focus spot puts itself elsewhere :cry:

So now two big zoom lenses fight for room in my little camera rucksack, and neither of the two works properly... :grumpy:

dsp921 · Jan 7, 2006

The general rule of thumb for hand holding is 1/focal length. Some people are steady handed and can shoot slower shutter speeds and some shake more. If you had the lens at full zoom 1/200 sec. would be about as slow as you could shoot in hand. For sharp captures with a long lens you need either more light or a tripod.
It's hard to tell on a low resolution version on the web, but I don't see any sharp areas in the photos. Could just be a little camera shake. Doesn't take much. Don't feel too bad, I have a lot of pictures of blurry birds...