Blue Jay close up
Posted: 09 May 2021 19:55
I know the limitations of my birds photography now. Rob was talking about his 8mp E500 and the 20mp EM5III today. This was a taken with the Olympus UZI in 2001. That was a 2mp point and shoot of the time. This photo is uncropped and a jpeg as the camera had no RAW back then. I walked the same path through a woods every evening on the way home from work. The woods was part of a wildlife preserve. I had some sunflower seeds for the blue jays and some raw meet for a fox and some other things for the animals that posed for me. This day I set on a bench before I got to where the birds usually were. Because he was impatient, this jay flew out in the open and landed on my should while I was setting up the camera. The shot was aperture preferred at the shortest focal length (38 equivalent) at f/2.8 which gave some shallow dof with the 1/2" CCD sensor. The technology is old and outdated and the camera had awful CA so I avoided high contrast shots with it. But even back then Olympus had a good IS system which has only gotten better over the years. I like this photo and the memory of taking a photo of an irritated jay on my shoulder. I do not think I could take that shot today with the better cameras and lenses. I did use PS back then and this was sharpened probably at 1 pixel 80%. I shot freelance for the newspaper in Peoria, IL. They did use this photo in a pullout section they did weekly about area events and places to go. It was only $25 a shot (and a press pass so I could get in places free), but if I could sell then 4 or 5 prints a week in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it helped me get more camera gear (which was still film mostly then). Of course I know an 11 year old camera cannot take a phot as good as a modern cellphone. 