Geneva WA, 1/4/2013

Geneva Wilderness Area Chapel

I drove out to Geneva Wilderness Area this morning before work.  I was hoping to try out my Christmas present that came in the mail yesterday: a Canon Powershot S100.  This is an advanced, compact point and shoot camera.  It has a number of features that I like: GPS tagging, a sharp, moderate wide-angle zoom lens (5x), a large sensor with relatively low noise (for a p&s camera), and the capability to shoot RAW images. I've been thinking it would be good to take scenic shots while photographing birds, and I didn't want to be slowed down by carrying two cameras or, worse, constantly switching lenses. I was really hoping to give the camera a work out this morning, but it was so dreary, cloudy, and drizzly that I didn't use it much.  I'm including one image above just because it seems like I should have something to show for my efforts.  What I find interesting in the above image is not the beauty of the photo (I don't like it that much), but I hand-held this shot at 800 ISO, and I still had a pretty usable noise levels.  If you zoom in on the image, there's visible noise, but it's much better than any other point and shoot I've ever used.  And if I take one image with this camera, I can use Lightroom to geo-tag all my SLR images very quickly and easily. So I'm very optimistic about this camera.

Carolina Chickadee

It was a relatively slow morning at Geneva. It was cloudy, dark and wet, and I never saw the sun. I didn't see a lot of activity, but as I was leaving I walked through an area where I found many birds.  Shooting up into cloud cover is no fun (see the Carolina Chickadee above), but when I could get a bird low enough to give it a nicer background, things worked out a little better.

Gray Catbird

Northern Cardinal