In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Each day of the year I will post something here about nature. It may be any format, a photo, video, audio, sketch or entry from my nature journal. It could be a written piece. Each day I will connect to nature in some way and share it here by the end of that day. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to the RSS feed or be notified by email. See all the 365 Nature posts.
Late yesterday afternoon my new Nikon D500 finally arrived. Although it had very little charge on the battery, I eagerly ran outside to try a few shots before it ran out and it got dark. Right away I was impressed and could see it was a significant improvement over my Nikon D300 I’d been using since 2009. For one it’s lighter, and it has a lot of little improvements like a built-in eye piece cover and movable view screen that is a touchscreen. And it’s fast, very fast. The shutter clicks much faster than my old camera and it’s quieter. I got a couple shots of our Anna’s Hummingbird yesterday and today after having read through much of the manual I went back outside briefly. It’s been raining nearly all day, but a break in the rain allowed me to try and find something to shoot. Although it’s dark today, I was able to turn up the ISO to get some shots. My old camera didn’t do well in low light, if I turned up the ISO to as much as 400 it would turn everything grainy. This new camera I can turn the ISO higher with very little noticeable grain.
While I was out a robin landed on the fence and preened itself, allowing me to take a number of shots trying out different settings.
