Thursday, June 16, 2005

The limits of 3X zoom


A heron fishes at dusk

One of the limitation of the non SLR digital cameras, is the expectation of zoom lens capabilities. My olympus has a 3X optical zoom. It is good and I like it but I just could not get close enough to this heron, as the dusk light failed.

Whilst I do have a further 3X "digital zoom", which just zooms in on the center of the images in the carema. I seldom use it because images are usually blurred, It is very hard to hand hold the camera steady enough, especially in low light conditions. so it is normally turned off. As you zoom in the amout of light avaialable for the exposure is less and the exposure required longer and risk of movement blurr greater

That doesn't worry me because I now I can always zoom in, using a cropping tool, after the photo is taken.

Post Process Zoom: Image cropped on the computer using picasa

1 comment:

rondo1 said...

I have a Kodak with a 10x, and it still is hard to get close to birds, but the size of an slr lens even for 3x is hefty.
Anyway, nice colors in background.