Mind Over Mutter

capture dolphins midair....with great color and precison, I might add!

What's this comment about? I happened to stroll into Sea World on a day when Nikon School was there. I truly did not plan it that way. I have a season pass and I happened to have a few spare hours in Orlando on Sunday, and the weather was good, so I popped the camera in the car and off I went.

The know-it-all digital photography buffoon with a Nikon D-70 sitting to my left during the Blue Horizon show insisted that I could not possibly get decent action shots with a Sony DSC- F828 because the shutter delay was too great. I replied that it was all in knowing your camera, and the larger issue with the Sony was not shutter delay, but the time it takes to record the data to the media, because you can shoot in burst mode (similar to using a motor drive on a conventional camera) but then you are locked out for a few seconds while the camera transfers the data to the card. I added that it helps if you record to Memory Stick Pro rather than Compact Flash--- and went back to my shooting.

(This is actually something I've learned by trial and error. It also matters WHOSE MSP you are using-- there are better transfer rates with some cards than others. There is a good reason for paying a little more for your media when you are shooting rapid motion-- wildlife, sports, etc. If battery life and data transfer are issues on your shoot, there are real arguments to be made for having a couple of high-end cards in your arsenal. You can use the slower MSP cards for portraiture and macros, and they're still faster than CF or a Microdrive.)

Of course, the fact that he kept referring to my camera as a "point and shoot" started to get on my nerves, but I was prepared to tune him out. I LIKE my Sony 99.99% of the time, and while I will probably eventually go to a DSLR one of these days, it is one hell of a camera for most of what I do. (And it doesn't hurt that my laptop is Sony as well, allowing for painless and seamless transfer while on the road.)

My new friend wanted to know what settings I was using, and I replied that I was presently experimenting with exposure bracketing (to create images with HDR via Photoshop) but that as a rule, I was slightly underexposing the images. The minute I said "Photoshop" he got a pained look on his face, and spouted off on the failure of photographers in the digital realm to actually learn how to take a photo, relying on PS to save their photographic posteriors.

I was having way too much fun taking pictures of dolphins and whales to pay any more attention to this particular Equus asinus (ummm...donkey, for those of you who skipped both Biology and Latin classes) but if you'd like to see more of the photos that I couldn't possibly get with my non-Nikon camera, there are a dozen and a half at http://www.jpkabala.com/SeaWorldBlueHorizon/index.htm
just to prove this one isn't a fluke