Digital Zoom

[urbpan]

My camera (which you all are fairly intimate with) has a digital zoom feature. While it allows me to zoom in 7x (whatever that means) as close, the resulting pictures are pretty grainy. I'm not sure it's worth using at all, but here's a bunch of pictures I took with it. What do you all think of it? (Frankly, I think when I see something far away, I should just have cottonmanifesto take a picture of it.


This squirrel was doing little adorable human things with its hands.





An American coot mills about some ring-billed gulls. They'll all be featured in 365 urban species articles when I get good enough pictures.


One of my favorite urban animals, but they haven't been posing for me lately. Maybe a sound recording will be better than a photograph.

Comments

[artemii.livejournal.com]

i agree; your close-ups are about a hundred times better (if not more!). i love blue jays.

p.s.

[artemii.livejournal.com]

ring-billed gulls are the only nominally-a-seabird i've ever seen in south dakota.

[vampyrusgirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, digital zoom is fairly useless. I've never liked it myself.

[(Anonymous)]

Digital zoom is almost a joke; it's not doing anything more than you could do yourself by taking the picture un-zoomed and making it really big in an image program. My camera has 3x optical zoom (real) and 3x digital zoom (lame), but I can turn the latter off completely.

I just bought an add-on telephoto lens for my cheapo digital from ebay, only to find that it was delivered to an address I lived two years ago. Wish me luck in tracking it down.

gribley
http://kittlybenders.blogspot.com

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

Digital Zoom is garbage. Basically all it does it zoom in, just like you can do on your computer after the shot is taken anyway. Don't bother with it and if you want to get a closer image, do it with a photo editor and cropping.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

This is what I get with my digital zoom.

[(Anonymous)]

awww, no fair, cotton -- that snazzy camera of yours has a 12x optical zoom, equivalent of a 432mm focal length on a nondigital 35mm camera -- that's the optical equivalent of a telephoto lens like this one (http://froogle.google.com/froogle_cluster?q=telephoto+lens+slr&pid=2099693203367297203&oid=5580439488310076022&btnG=Search+Froogle&lmode=&addr=&scoring=mrd). It's the incredible optical zoom, not the digital zoom, that's doing that for you. and it is spectacular, I must admit. beautiful photo.

(if you right-click on the image and do "properties", on the "advanced" tab you can read all sorts of detail about the camera, the exposure settings, etc etc -- so I can see what camera you're using and the settings.)

Looks like a fantastic camera; I may need to upgrade (yeah, when my ship comes in).


gribley
http://kittlybenders.blogspot.com/

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

This is what the optical zoom gets me...


I LOVE my camera SO MUCH!!!

The image stabilization technology helps a TON.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Pet chinchillas do the same human-y things with their front paws. It makes it darn near irresistable to go ahead and give them another treat, just to see them holding something in their little hands.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

There's something about rodents and their front paws...
All the rodents I can think of will sit on their haunches and manipulate food objects with their front paws: mice, rats, squirrels, woodchucks, porcupines...
wait, maybe not caviomorph rodents...I can't imagine a capybara doing it, and guinea pigs don't seem to. But a lot of rodents do. A lot of rodents build nests and dens, too, the beaver's being the most elaborate.

I wonder if the gnawing teeth and the hand-like front paws tend to go together--the hands are needed to stabilize difficult to chew food objects.

hmmm...

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Well, the porcupines are caviomorphs too, and new world porcupines do hold stuff like that, though old world porcupines don't. In general most of the caviomorph rodents aren't very rodenty, are they? Let's see: no tails (well, except for the chinchillas), large heads, round snouts, strictly herbivorous rather than omnivorous, small litters of precocial young... nope, not very rodenty. There's talk of moving them to a new order, rather than just being a suborder of rodentia. Like the lagomorphs 80 or more years ago. They're doing the DNA work now to justify that, at least on guinea pigs. But then there'll be the question of which of the caviomorph rodents really are caviomorphs, and which are still rodents - gotta test the capybaras, and the degus, and all those separate porkypine species... lots to keep the zoologists and taxonomists busy for a while.

Given how well rabbits and guinea pigs gnaw without the hand-like paws, I don't think that "hands" are necessary but maybe there's a slight advantage to them.