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| Townsend's Warbler on Coyote Brush, Grandview Park |
I've been meaning to check out the new Panasonic FZ-80D's RAW-format imaging quality for a while, and yesterday I finally did it. I took so long because I've continued to be mesmerized by the term "point-and-shoot" as being little more than a toy camera. I think I'm finally ready to shake off that little delusion.
I started out by shooting a couple of subjects in my back yard, including some turkey and hawk feathers, just to see if there was any noticeable difference between the RAW and JPEG files. I had very low expectations. I figured there might be a little tiny bit of difference, and only if you squinted real hard.
Well, instead, my expectations were completely blown out of the water!
The RAW files give you so much more to work with (the resulting file size is around 21 megabytes, or twice as big as the highest resolution JPEGs), and they also look more voluptuous than JPEGS straight out of the camera.
But what I was especially interested in was how ISO 3200 would look. With a monster ISO like that I could eliminate the camera-shake and subject-movement issues that wreck so many photos. But could a "point-and-shoot" possibly deliver decent images so far above its base ISO of 80?
After the back yard shots showed promise I wanted to try it out on live birds (not just feathers), so I trekked over to Grandview Park, where bunches of sparrows can usually be found. I got there, and there wasn't a bird in sight! No cheeping within earshot either. But just as I was about to go somewhere else, a pair of Townsend's warblers flew into the bushes right next to me.
All the bird shots on this page were done at ISO 3200. Please click to view them larger. I can hardly believe this little camera can deliver so much. But I must confess the camera did have some help, namely Lightroom's noise-reduction feature. All the images on this page (and most likely from this day forward) were shot in RAW mode, then adjusted in Lightroom and transferred as TIFF files to be adjusted again and resized as a JPEG in Photoshop.
P.S. It finally dawned on me that I can copy bird photos to my phone camera, then use the Merlin app to identify them. So I've gone back to correct the yellow warblers vs. orange-crowned warblers in previous posts, and I look forward to using the app more in the future!
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| Rear Window View on Saturday |
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| Townie Hunting in Coyote Brush |
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| Townie on the Move |
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| Coyote Brush Flower Fluff |
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| Some juvenile white-crowned sparrows eventually showed themselves. I guess since it's not mating season, the black-and-white-capped males were hiding instead of belting out their tunes from the tops of bushes. |
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| A couple of black-and-orange stink bugs were climbing around on a poison oak patch. |
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| There's usually a fair amount of trash that entitled twits have tossed into the weeds. I thought it might be fun to stick a dollar bill deep down in the poison oak (but I restrained myself). |
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Stink Bug Side View
(The red color in the background is from ice plant.) |
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| The grass you see here is called Ehrharta erecta, and I've learned that it's the bane of city park gardeners because it's so invasive and hard to get rid of. So I was glad to see this young white-crowned sparrow nibbling on it, showing that it does have some use to the local wildlife. |
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| City View from Grandview Park |
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| Zoomed View |
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