Month: May 2022

Telephoto Lens (Part 2)

My new telephoto lens is probably now my most high tech piece of camera equipment, and I’ve been pretty impressed with its capabilities. As I’ve been teaching myself to use it, I’ve been getting an idea of what kinds of things it can do.

goldfinch (in nonbreeding plumage) on sunchoke seedhead
Goldfinch foraging on sunchoke seeds. This photo was a surprise because I took it through a window screen! I can see some loss of quality in the photo as a result, but it isn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, and I would have startled the birds away if I’d gone outside (they were pretty close to the door) so I was happy to get anything at all in that situation.

I mentioned in my last post that I can use my telephoto lens like a pair of binoculars, but the lens actually has an edge over binoculars because it has some built in stabilization that cancels out the tiny movements you make when holding something, which get very magnified when looking at a zoomed in image of something far away. This means the image I see looking through the viewfinder is much steadier than what I see looking through binoculars. (And then being able to take a photo of whatever I’m looking at is also nice, of course!)

house finch perched on a cedar branch
For birds with subtle markings or features or birds hanging out in hard to see places, like this house finch in a cedar tree, looking through the telephoto lens helps to be able to identify the birds, and is helping me get a better idea of what birds we have around here.

When it comes to taking the actual picture, the stabilization helps some in preventing the photo from being blurry from slight movements (when you aren’t using a tripod, which isn’t very practical in a lot of situations), but the usual way to do this is with a very fast shutter speed. The person at the camera shop where I got the lens told me I’d be able to use a bit slower shutter speed than I would otherwise, but I would still need it faster than I was used to to get a sharp photo. Despite this advice, it was probably inevitable that I would try pushing the limits with lower speeds eventually (because faster speeds limit the light available and you end up with a darker picture or you have to find a way to make up for it elsewhere), and surprisingly, I was finding I could hold the camera steady enough to use pretty low speeds without getting a blurry photo, which is great… until a subject starts moving around quickly.

a slightly blurry photo of a woodpecker eating a dogwood berry
This was where I got a little too confident with slow shutter speeds… I can’t say for sure this picture would have turned out well if I’d used a faster speed, but this woodpecker was foraging pretty energetically on the dogwood berries and definitely moving around too fast for the speed I was on.
The moon, at least, is a good safe subject to use a slow shutter speed on, which is helpful with a dark scene like this.

Lately it seems like I’m very much starting to get the hang of getting good bird photos (I’ll probably save those for their own posts, though), but even the less than perfect shots have been helping me to identify quite a lot of birds I wasn’t able to see clearly enough before; I mostly just managed to identify the bigger/brighter/more distinctive looking species.

a swamp sparrow on a branch over water
This photo of a swamp sparrow almost turned out perfectly – except that there was something out of focus creating a bit of a haze over the bird. Otherwise, it is perfectly in focus, the sparrow is in a nice position and the background is good… but at least this photo provides a nice view of most of the bird’s markings so I could identify it as a swamp sparrow! Sparrows can be a bit tricky with their subtle markings and usually mostly brown colors… but like a lot of my subjects, they benefit from a closer look.

Getting a Telephoto Lens (Part 1)

Relatively recently, I got a new type of lens for my camera. Previously, I had a macro lens and a pretty standard non-specialized type of lens. The new one is a telephoto lens, which is a type of lens that allows you to zoom in on distant subjects.

Rabbit lounging in the grass
A very relaxed rabbit.

A telephoto lens has very different uses and possibilities compared with a macro lens, but there is one thing about it that feels familiar; both lenses allow me to photograph things I can’t quite make out. I may be able to see them, but not clearly enough to tell what I’m looking at. Through the lens, I can see them with much more detail. (Sometimes I will just look through the lens like binoculars to see what that dark shape in the trees is.) So, what the macro lens does for tiny objects (or creatures), the telephoto lens does for distant objects (or creatures).

A male goldfinch perched on a spruce branch
A male goldfinch perched on a spruce branch. This was taken shortly after I got the new lens.

So this new lens doesn’t make any of my previous lenses obsolete, it just opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities that weren’t there before. One of the main things I’d had in mind for it when I got it was to use it to photograph birds; a telephoto lens is pretty much a requirement for bird photography. The lens also works well for butterflies and presumably any other large, skittish insects, like dragonflies.

A monarch butterfly on New England aster flowers
A monarch butterfly foraging on New England aster flowers. It is possible to get a photo like this without a telephoto lens, but it would be a lot harder and more dependent on luck. (Most of my previous butterfly photos happened when a butterfly approached while I was photographing other pollinators.)

Another use for it I’ve found that’s less apparent is to be able to get a different angle on certain subjects, even though I can get close to them and I want a ‘close up’ of them…

Sunchoke flowers against dark background
This is a relatively close up picture of these sunchokes, but I took it from a ways away so that I could line the bright yellow flowers up with the dark backdrop of a clump of trees to the south, making for some sharp contrast. I had seen this contrast in previous years, but I wasn’t able to photograph it with the lenses I had at that point. Once I got the telephoto lens, I knew exactly what to do with it.