mollwollfumble said:
Nice to hear from you again DO. I remember you as a great portrait photographer.
I don’t know even a quarter of the abbreviations flying around here.
> With no mirror to be slapping around, the only noise is the physical shutter, and even that can be disabled to give you absolute silent shooting which is good for wildlife
Now that, I like. I really wish I could disable the shooting sound of my present camera. It doesn’t upset the possum but does upset both the cat and all the birds.
I don’t do “sharp”. I don’t do narrow depth of field. I could be persuaded to do auto-bracketing.
I do do zoom (60x optical), and want night (camera won’t focus if light is too faint), want macro (ideally photograph insects just 1 mm long), want timed multi-shots (at present no briefer than 30 seconds), want high speed, want rugged, want IR.
LIkewise, Molly. A shame you are in the bad part of Oz, it’d be nice to catch up at some stage. ;)
Zoom? You just need a good lens. And with 40 megapickles, you can crop the hell out of the photo and still have a high res image. I have seen some nice images of Saturn taken with standard zoom lenses. Focusing in the dark is always an issue, but the new generation of cameras do pretty well at it. Macro is easy – standard lenses with extension tubes will get you surprising results. Actually, you don’t even need extension tubes.
This image, for example, was shot hand held in my back yard with a 70mm lens.
But because 40mp, you can crop it to this:
Again, hand held with a 100mm lens:
Time lapse is pretty common these days, most cameras are surprisingly water resistant and rugged, but IR is not something you can get off the shelf. You can modify existing cameras, but it requires major surgery and is probably easier to just buy one from a mob who modifies them for the astrophotographers.
