eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

Alright kiddies, gather 'round the campfire... Ol' Mentor CapeCodAlan is going to lend his years of hard-fought troubleshooting skills to the field of small-scale (cheap) digital photography. The mission was to once and for all make sense of a digital camera whilst practicing capturing the backyard feeder.

• Rule Number One: Make sure that you have permission to mess with the stuff with which you are messing. It's bad enough to foul up something when you're supposed to be tinkering with it. It's entirely another issue when you croak a system that you weren't supposed to be playing with in the first place. Regarding the Vivitar and the feeders, all systems were go. So far, so good.
  
  
• Rule Number Two: Set expectations appropriately. Got that one covered too... Neither I nor you the reader are expecting "lens extraordinaire" from this site, let alone from a cheap little Vivitar 8600s. (The compact camera sells for apx. $100, snags images using 8.1 mega pixels, and has an optical zoom of 6x. You can see the 8600 below, attached to a $1.00 "garage sale" tripod as it is aimed at one of the feeders roughly 30 feet away.)
  
  

  

  
  
  
• Rule Number Three: Be methodical. Make notes concerning the camera settings for every picture taken. In the case of the Vivitar, (or any modern digital) that's a witch's brew of mode dial settings, zooms, and menu options... Well, this is where I kinda dropped the ball. More accurately, I never even really had sight of the ball. As soon as I had the camera set up and the manual open, I went bonkers playing with all the features. Ol' Mentor CapeCodAlan snapped dozens of pictures and completely lost track of what he did to get those pictures. (Though the digital-zoom pics were "memorably ghastly".) Granted, all were not bad, and the two below (the last is an enlargement and shows the grain of the feeder roof) are perfectly respectable for a backyard birder. If only I knew how I got them...

Seriously, here are some suggestions to give some of you novice avian feeder photographers a head start...

• Don't be put off by the need for expensive equipment. A bottom-buck digital camera and your computer are all you really need. You can build from there. Used equipment (like our tripod) is fine.
• Don't rely on digital zoom. Optical zoom is the only way to go.
• RTM. (That's tech jargon for "Read The Manual".)
• Experiment and take careful notes. That's where I messed up. (Now I have to repeat the process and actually keep track of my efforts.)
• Ask questions. Ask me. Ask your neighbors. Ask photography forums and blogs. Ask any of the people on our blogroll. Ask the guy in the camera shop in the mall.
• Practice, and don't get discouraged when things don't turn out well.

As always, humbled by the feeders,

Ol' Mentor CapeCodAlan