Rayetta’s Birds, Class Aves Plus the Zuiko 70-300mm

Well. If you want to torture yourself, unnecessarily, try taking pictures of birds. No. Not just any birds. Try taking pictures of nervous birds.

Which birds are the nervous ones. Easy that, the ones that move around.

In these parts, the CB, all the birds are nervous except one, Mimus polyglottos. Consequently, Mimus polyglottos is the only bird that poses for electropictoids. The rest of them are too nervous, fidgety and motile for posing.

I have, desultorily, been torturing myself for weeks, taking pictures of birds. That’s because I thought I should get some practice with my Zuiko 70-300mm lens before the butterflies come back, re-emerge, or whatever it is those butterflies do, do. Despite the torture, I am glad I have been practicing.

My facts and opinions on the 70-300mm employed on birds, Class Aves, are as follows. The 4/3 sensor size needs about a 25mm FL lens to produce a 35mm, normal, 50mm equivalent image. So the top end of the 300mm gives about 12x (300/25), sort of. But if you think the bird will appear to be as big and close in your camera viewfinder as it does in your Nikon Superior 10x42's, you are just torturing yourself. Also, the image will never appear that sharp on your computer screen. If you think it ever will, you are just torturing yourself.

But getting back to the 70-300mm, 12x is pretty short for nervous birds. That said, if you do not mind having lots of scenery, most of it out of focus, around your nervous bird, then you can take pictures anyway. But, unless your camera is image stablized, unlike mine, you will have to shoot at 1/320 to keep your nervous bird from appearing too fuzzy. That’s if you are lucky. The electropictoid with the bird in the center may come out fuzzy anyway.

This Cassidix mexicanus, a common sight in these parts, is helping himself to our precious water resource. The bird bath is shaded, so I had to add flash, pp. He’s fairly sharp on the back, where the single focus point was located.

Also, if the bird is in a well-lit location, I need to dial up the aperture, hoping to get as much depth of field as possible. About F 8 at 1/320 minimum may be OK for fairly sharp electropictoids in bright sunlight. So this lens, with my camera, needs a high shutter speed and aperture to try to be sharp.

For a while, I thought my lens was a fuzzy copy. But when I shoot on a tripod, the images are acceptable, though not great. Yet, for a 300mm, (600mm equivalent), alternative lens options are very expensive, and maybe, not much better. So I shall keep plugging away.

Of course though, nervous birds do not often sit around in bright sunlight. They stick to the shadows. This lens, looking into shadows, for sure, indicates a tripod. Did you ever try to track a nervous bird through the brushy shadows with a camera on a tripod? Did you torture yourself?

Nevertheless, I am fixing to keep the 70-300mm to see if I can find something it is good for that corresponds to my interests. Maybe, on really bright days, it shall be good for butterflies.

Then too, I have not figured out how to employ the 70-300mm and the FL 36 flash simultaneously. That combination is very heavy for hand holding. I need to work with that combination to see if it is good for anything interesting that might be of interest to me.