Friday, June 01, 2012

Waldo Canyon 6/1/12

Waldo Canyon starts out kind of drab - scrub oak that can be a bit hot in summer.  But the further you go, the prettier it gets, including a creek crossing and some shaded areas and nice variety overall.  Sadly, later this summer Waldo Canyon burned and it has not reopened as of yet (2013) and will not be like what is shown here in our lifetimes.












Green-tailed Towhee










Milbert's Tortoiseshell






2 comments:

Zain said...

I am subscribed to your blog so I get to see these wonderful pictures - and then I think to myself that I have wasted a fortune buying a gear which I just cant use well. Which camera is that which you use? Is it a SLR or a point-to-shoot? Do you use manual focus or is it the result of autofocus? If it is autofocus; it is pretty amazing considering the precision, and I guess it is too fast as well because presumably the birds don't sit and pose for a long time.

Also, how much is the zoom level? For example, roughly how much was the distance in the first image between the subject and the camera?

otowi said...

Thanks - I'm glad you're enjoying the pictures.
I have a point-and-shoot camera with high zoom that can be purchased for around $200. It is a Kodak Easyshare Z981 with 26x zoom. The zoom is definitely better than binoculars - if I'm carrying binoculars and can't see something well enough I use my camera and go home and look at it on the computer - I've been able to identify objects that were hundreds of yards away or in some cases tens of miles away via the zoom that I couldn't otherwise. I'm very pleased with it, but there are plenty of pictures that don't get posted because they weren't great, and there are lots of wildlife images that I miss because it isn't super fast, but sometimes things work out. It is autofocus and I mainly use the "running man" setting - which is the sport setting. I even managed to get a few decent photos of a lunar eclipse without a tripod. The solar eclipse didn't come out because I would need filters.

The hummingbird in the first photo I would guess was 30 feet away. As you can see, in low light or wrong angle I will get a shadow and not much color. But sometimes that's neat anyway. The Robin in the second photo was probably 100 yards away. The Green-tailed Towhees later in the set were about 30 feet away for the first one, and maybe 50 feet away for the second, but in better light. The butterfly was only a few feet away, and same for the lizard.