This spring, I did subscribe to the US American Outdoor Photographer magazine. Not only does it cover many interesting topics about nature photography and has convinced me with an issue I bought at the airport somewhere that they have topics of interest for my passion, but also it is – compared to German language magazines – dirt cheap (when subscribed).
As I am an eager reader not only of Internet blogs, but also of old-school printed material, I decided to reflect more about the learnings from my lecture, and I will start today with a list of enlightments gained from the November 2008 edition of Outdoor Photographer:
- There is an article about Digiscoping, which I find interesting because of the maybe affordable access to large magnifications. They list the need for using a Compact camera with at least a 3-4x zoom in order to avoid the vignetting caused by the circular image rendered by the scope.
Honestly, I would not consider using a compact camera for Digiscoping, being used to the image quality and speed of the SLR. They claim, and I didn’t knew that before, that using a DSLR with e.g. a specific adapter or a 50mm lens with the right filter thread provides less magnification than using the compact, but of course you retain the advantages of the faster camera.
What I also didn’t knew is that the fixed eyepieces of the scope have a larger field of view than the zoom eyepieces.
Interesting to note for all those Sony Alpha owners – they report that the in-camera stabilizer usually doesn’t work for Digiscoping. Too bad, *that* would have been a combo! As a Nikon guy, I just shrug
- Rob Sheppard wrote he would prefer Lightroom plus Photoshop Elements over a new CS version. This is interesting, I am using Photoshop Elements and CS3 so far. Maybe I should indeed look at LR soon. [Adding LR to the Gear Wish List in the background]
- In their Editor’s Picks they list the Ansmann Digicharger Vario. Looks like you cannot only charge all kings of Lithium-Ion batteries, but also standard AA. I sense an opportunity to reduce my travel bag – for the D300, the D40, and the SB800 I usually carry three different charges (sigh). This needs to go on my list as well. Luckily, we are approaching Xmas fast.
- For home projection, there is a special wall paint from paintonscreen.com that can replace a dedicated projection screen. They even have a German version of their website, giving hope that I could actually get it in Germany. Now this is interesting! I have to research on this a bit more.
- Of the 6 silver bullets for better landscape images from Guy Tal, I liked the “Get Out More” best, as I think this exactly hits my weak spot. Add “Be There Before Sunrise” and I pledge guilty. Looking at Guy’s homepage in the web, I was slightly disappointed that this article seems to have been published quite some times in slight variations, so if you are interested, visit his website!
- I had always wondered about how “magnification” and “mm focal length” were interchangeable. For the Digiscopes, they listed 180x magnification as being equivalent to a 9000 mm tele lens (wow, by the way). And looking at these numbers again, I figure they are just based on the 50 mm “normal” lens, as 50 mm x 180 = 9000 mm. I wonder if this is physically correct… as far as I remember a real “normal” lens would be 43 mm, and not 50 mm. [Let me check Wikipedia].
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