SX30 - Birds in trees

andrewhuxman wrote in post #11549847
Great stuff Kenn, I just learned that Robins dont necessarily migrate south if there is a food supply for them they will stick around

Thanks Andrew, We've heard this too, and a few of ours do stay. The one we call Bully does stay year after year and is easy to recognize by his behavior. He knows we will feed him and he comes boldly close to get his raisins every day 365.

drama wrote in post #11550282
Very nice series, unbelievable with the sx 30!

Thanks drama, We're had a lot of practice shooting our birds with these small Canon superzooms. The SX30 has it's pros and cons but we are real pleased with the images we can get from it.

scrumpy wrote in post #11551243
Really great shots from a SX30 Ken.
Obviously you are very happy with the camera - the specs are good; would you be even more pleased if it had the ability to shoot RAW? Or does it not bother you? I have never used anything but RAW; would I miss it?

Happy New Year.

Thank you Scrumpy, None of our cams save RAW, so we've developed our method around setting in-camera processing to minimal, reduced, or neutral settings, and this does give us better control in post.
There is a widely-used hack for Canon compacts called CHDK which provides custom menus for saving RAW and RAW+Jpeg (and many other features not provided by the stock cameras). But the SX30's native write times and continuous rates are very slow by DSLR standards and we've chosen not to slow them down further with this. We're pretty satisfied with the results we can get processing the jpegs.

Thanks again to all who commented.

Kenn

Wonderful bird shots! I am a brand new SX30 owner. So far, so good. I'm obviously learning the camera. We had a family reunion yesterday and I took about 80 "people" shots. Three came out as good as I wanted them too! Obviously, I still have some practicing and learning to do.

Part of the problem was the flourescent lighting in the building where we had the event... another was the harsh built-in flash. I have a Speedlight ordered with tilt and cruise, so that should help the problem.

I read this thread and I didn't see if you posted what settings you were using. Program Mode? AF? ?

Thank you for any help.....

Bill Luster
Lee's Summit, MO
Canon SX30is, Canon SD630 (a great little P/S!)

Nice eye captures on the Red-bellied!