Backyard Birder

Elusive Cardinals!

I found a couple of settings on my camera that made a big difference in the quality of the pictures. For one, the default exposure setting was not center weighted. The other was to use the RAW format. Up until recently I never even heard of it. RAW format is a lot more forgiving of the exposure. You can end up with a pleasing photo, even if the exposure is off. So I was trying all day Saturday to get a better pic of the cardinals. Every time I turned on the camera, they flew away! Sunday the window was frosted over. I was perusing the camera manual and thought I would try out the movie feature. I hand held the camera and caught a short video of the female. It is a short video, but it was still 17 MB! I found a free program, MPEG Streamclip, to compress that, and ended up with less than 2 MB. I moved this to a seperate page because it added too much to the load time. See it here.