Cormorant Camera Challenge

Well, I was able to test my newest camera settings yesterday, and I had quite a bit of success. I decided to go to the smallest nature park, so that my trip wouldn't have to be as long. If the new settings were messed up, I wanted to find out before I had too many pictures.

The main thing I changed this time was the ISO setting. Before the ISO was set to 400. That was much too high for getting anything I needed to use the zoom. It gave all of my pictures an awful grainy look. So I changed the ISO down to 200 and lower. The camera decided what was appropriate, but never went over 200.

That seemed to do the trick of fixing the graininess! I'm now very close to what I want from the camera. The colors are good now. There is no blur or graininess. But I do have one problem still. The lighting is too glaring for me. I think I need to turn down the contrast a little bit. It actually looked like that outside yesterday, but I want the light to be less harsh. I'll give details of my settings when I get it all fixed.

Okay, on to the story of this bird in the pictures here. When I got to the park yesterday I saw that one of the two Cormorants had come back. As a matter of fact this one has been there for the past three days. The other one only shows up some of the time.

I have run through this park like a crazy person three times now so I could get every angle possible for pictures of this cormorant. I took this shot above from the fishing platform. That was the easy one. All I had to do was go down the walkway and then calmly take a few pictures.

After I was done there, I ran back up the walkway like a madman. I hurried through the park, ignoring everything else, until I found an old deer trail that leads down a hill to the water. I had to crash through several bushes, and I almost fell in the water. It's deep even by the shore. I finally balanced myself against a tree so I could get the pictures of this bird.

You might notice white specks in every one of my pictures today. They are those flying fuzzballs with the seeds on the ends. Those things were everywhere the last few days. I tried to get a shot of them a few days ago. They were so thick that they looked like a cloud. The camera decided it had other plans.

This is something else I learned. The automatic mode, where I can get several pictures in a row very quickly, wasn't moving quickly at all. I was beginning to think there was something else wrong with the camera. There was! It was actually the memory card.

The camera manual said to do a low level format on it. That did the trick! Now it's as fast as ever. It was just clogged up with old junk. I always delete pictures off of it when I transfer them to the computer, but I didn't know to do this. I guess that's a good lesson for anyone. Do a low level format on the memory card every once in awhile.

Enough for today! My camera adventure is going great so far. Pretty soon I hope to come to an exciting conclusion with it.