Photography fun! What gear do you use and what do you like to shoot?

I'm still learning the ins and outs of photography after getting a DSLR a couple of years ago, but I am having the most fun taking pictures of nature but urban settings are so much fun with the wide array of colors and shapes. I want to get into doing macro photography so I picked up some macro tubes recently, along with a polarizer filter and a battery-to-wall adapter for time-lapse stuff.

Actually I finally bit the bullet last week on a tripod and ball mount after sitting on the fence for weeks and months on what to get. It took a long time to get a clear picture(hah!) of what worked best for me because it just works that way with photo gear. There are so many parameters that it can get difficult. I'm 6'1" and that alone pits comfort (leaning over to look through the viewfinder all the time) against portability. I'm not doing that to my back, so I got a slightly taller one made of carbon fiber. I also want to get a speedlight flash and some different lenses, but that's going to take another round of research!

As some of you might already know, I'm visited daily by the neighborhood squirrels because I own a squirrel restaurant:



Here's one of my oldest and most vocal customers. From the looks of her, she's tired of feeding babies!

those pics are quite good
and squirrels are cute (we don't have them here)

I have been thinking about getting a decent camera and trying my hand at some nature photography  

Woo-hoo, photography! I shoot high-school sports for work and not much for a hobby, though I recently took the camera (Canon 7D, almost always fitted with a 70-200 2.8f zoom on it and a high-performance CF card) to the Fort Worth Zoo. Here's some of my stuff (sorry if some of these are too big):

Absolutely fantastic shots! I can't wait to post some new stuff with my new toys :-)

Thanks! Have to confess, I'm pretty jealous of that granular detail you captured. What's your camera?

Nikon D7000. It's a fantastic camera. I use either the 18-200mm or this 50mm prime. Actually I left out an even more detailed zoom of her eye, you can see some blue sky, the rails and their shadows, the portable air conditioner vent with the spacer above it, and a bit of the deck.

@lurker
Now you just have to capture the Image you want in the refelction of a squirrls eye.
..... I'm pretty sure thats art.  

Man, that is one fantastic camera. One of my favorite shooters used those -- recently left for a legal job in Colorado, and I did appreciate his photos, even if he had no eye for moments. My problem is that my tutor was a Canon devotee, but I might have to commit a sacrilege one of these days

No fair, I wrote a lengthy post last night and swore it posted. Oh well, maybe I'll try to remember everything I said and type it out again today. Erg.

It's really impressive the amount of features it has, and how responsive it is. Just fun to shoot. I probably could've gotten more detail if I'd been using a sharper lens and tried to focus better. Original

I had Canon for a bit but did not like the ergonomics and layout of controls. So yeah, the upgrade to my body, the Nikon D7100, is available right now with the same 18-200mm lens at Costco and online some places for $1750, that's a great price for what you get. Will hold its value too. I'm also impressed at the way prices have been falling on full-frame sensor bodies, I'd sure love a full sensor for even more detail but right now that's just going too far on the price-to-usefulness scale. My next big purchase will probably be a better lens, but I could go so many directions that I need to spend more time shooting.

Do you ever do video with the camera or do you use a dedicated camcorder for that? I picked up a four-channel field recorder to replace the in-camera mic with the idea that I'd like to do some surround/multitrack stuff.

Ouch, yeah the wind is a killer, something I'd imagine would be tough to get away from on a camera, short of gluing a little foam earbud pad over the hole for the mic :-) My mic came with a foam windbreaker you can wrap over the end of it.

It's a risk not monitoring. You wouldn't shoot video without a viewfinder so why not audio? I got a Y-cable that expands the headphone jack on the recorder to also go to the mic input of the camera, that's got the correct attenuation built in to go from line level to mic level (it's even tweaked for particular models) so you don't have to do sync it up with the video later.

I'm not sure why the narration is so quiet, but it's always good to normalize before you cash out from the editor :-) I enjoyed the report!

The funny thing is, it sounds way better on my computer than on any other I've seen it on (which is actually just two or three others). I've wondered if my sound card does something funny to audio before that happened as well. Oh, and glad you liked it!

 

DSLR = Nikon D7000 body, with a Sigma 28-250 "superzoom" macro lens (planning on buying a 10-20mm wide-angle lens sometime next month..);   This is my "newest toy" that I bought specifically for taking nature, landscape and travel shots..

"Pocket camera" = Olympus µ, 5Mp, that I've owned for nearly a decade ~ this is my general "go to" camera at the moment, and the most convenient to carry around.

I also have a couple of my pre-digital film cameras that are rarely used nowadays, plus 5 cameras that I inherited off my late father, (including a Polaroid "instant" camera that hasn't seen any use in yonks, and a 'Box Brownie' from back in the early days of the last century..). SO, adding in a JVC mini' video-cam' as well, along with a couple of "museum pieces" that do still work ~ I must have something like 9 or 10 cameras in my collection, all up !!!  

Bee! Good to see you here! x

We're fairly recently invested in a Fuji S8500 16MP 46x Optical Zoom Bridge Camera.  We've really enjoyed using it and got some great shots too.  A great "inbetween" digital camera that won't break the bank either!  They go out of date so quickly don't they.