Wednesday 14 December 2011

New camera!

I've lured you in thinking i've got some dangerous SLR beastie haven't I? Well unfortunately that isn't the case, i've merely upgraded my phone. To a shiny new samsung galaxy s2 that has a whopping 8 megapixel camera attached to it. Considering my old phone had a shameful 5 megapixel bag of turds attached to it this must thus be regarded as a technological advancement on par with the invention of the wheel. By my estimates I should be able to produce 60% better images now!

A veritable plethora of assignments and suchlike has prevented me from doing any birding over the past couple of weeks except a couple of quick visits to see the Short eared Owls on the way back from uni so over the past two days I've been having a quick blast at the birds in the garden to see what sort of images I could attain with the new toy:


there's a few of these around at the minute.

and loads of these...

about 5 or 6 of these too....

but only one of these!!!

damn you autofocus!

squirl

terrible image (i can still do those) of a coal tit.

hungry goldie

perching goldie

perching bluey

ENORMO FINCH!!!

8 comments:

  1. Interesting - I also have a Galaxy S2, but haven't tried it through the scope yet. What sort of scope are you using with it? I've always failed miserably at any kind of digiscoping as I've never had a good enough scope.

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  2. Im using an ancient Swift nighthawk ED65-U purchased in c.1995 that is very basic and almost certainly inferior to whatever scope you own so I'd give it a blast! I've yet to try it on anything at moderate-long range but im reasonably pleased with the images so far... certainly a step up from what the old phone could achieve!

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  3. I certainly will give a go - these are much better than anything I've taken with my Canon compact camera through my Opticron HR66 scope! Did you use any zoom on the phone camera, or are they cropped? One problem I find with my Canon is that even on the max 3x zoom it doesn't fill the frame with the wide angle eyepiece I've got on the scope.

    One other thing - the Galaxy's also got a pretty good HD video recorder on it, so that may be worth a try as well.

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  4. Arse - it doesn't work at all with my scope. Because I've got such a wide angle eyepiece (28xWW) I have to zoom all the way up to 4x on the phone to get rid of the vignetting (and even then it doesn't completely eliminate it), and then the quality is complete crap because of the digital zoom. Same problem I have with my Canon compact in fact.

    Oh well, at least I've got a proper camera and lens, even if I can't take photos of birds from half a mile away with it!

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  5. I still get quite a bit of that vignetting stuff round the edge of my images but I just crop that out! I havent tried the zoom (or tweaked any other settings) yet but I shall, the HD video sounds like it could be worth a punt too!

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  6. You must have a scope eyepiece with a much narrower field of view. If I don't zoom, all I see on the phone screen is a small circle (about 2cm diameter) of bright white!

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  7. Ah...yes....my scope must have a very narrow field of view as I get at least 75% of my screen filled with glorious imagey goodness...tis your own fault for having a fancy scope I reckon!

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