This is apparently the week of super long blog posts and personal sharing here on renae.org. I’ll be back to wildlife and nature photos ASAP, I promise. Like I said, the well is just a little dry right now because I’ve been so busy. Anyway, in addition to being ridiculously busy recently, I was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. A lot of things probably caused it, the most obvious being that I type for a living (and worked a lot of overtime recently), and my habit of using chopsticks to eat all meals that are not soup or pizza, and, I’m very sorry to say, my photography. I have a way of carrying my DSLR when I hike that I’m sure contributed to the problem quite a bit. And honestly, I sometimes take WAY too much gear with me when I go to parks. I’m so scared of missing a picture of something exciting that even when I go out to parks just to hike (instead of specifically looking for wildlife to photograph), I take 30 pounds of camera gear with me. It’s DUMB. And apparently hurting me. So I had to change some of my lifestyle choices. I do wrist exercises before and during work, and I wear a wrist brace while sleeping. I’ve been using a fork instead of chopsticks (although I’m not happy about it).
More expensively, I had to rethink my hiking gear. I just CAN’T take a 7D Mark II, 400 mm lens (sometimes 150-600 mm), 24-105 mm, AND a mirrorless camera with high-end lens out for several-mile hikes a few times a week. And honestly, sometimes carrying all that gear makes me less adventurous than I’d like to be. The parks around here are very hilly and there have been times when I’ve been rather worried about falling and breaking thousands of dollars of equipment. I’m extremely hesitant to do most water crossings. Sometimes I want to go out specifically to photograph something and I’ll want and need my good equipment, but sometimes I just want to go hiking. I don’t want to ever not have a camera, though, because I KNOW the day I don’t have a camera, regardless of where I am or how unexpected it is, I WILL see a mountain lion. Or a wolverine. Or a yeti. I KNOW it. So I did some research and decided to buy a refurbished bridge camera: a Nikon Coolpix P900 – mostly because it has the longest zoom lens on the market. With an upper reach of the 35mm equivalent of 2000 mm, its reach is way more than even my huge 150-600 mm lens. It can also do wide angles, which obviously the 150-600 mm can not. So in theory I should be able to capture anything I encounter with a single camera. It also weighs much less than my DSLR setup, and I care about it much less so I can worry about it less. I haven’t had much time as yet to take it out, but on the few outings I have had with it, I’ve been mostly impressed with it. It does hurt my wrist a little to take photos – if I take a bunch in rapid succession – but probably less than my DSLR. And I don’t protectively CLUTCH it when not using it like I do the DSLR, which is the big thing hopefully saving my wrist. It is a lot less weight I’m carrying and therefore I feel more freedom.
This may be too technical for some of you to care about, but the two huge annoyances I have with it are: 1) no RAW capability and 2) no back-button focusing. Obviously the image quality and auto-focusing are nowhere near that of my 7DII: birds in flight photos will be nearly impossible, but it’s proven to be a little better than I expected it to be. (Although I hate, hate, hate, the lack of back-button focusing more than I even realized I would.) I read a lot of reviews before I bought it and a lot of people complained that although the zoom was great, it’s too hard to focus when zoomed in, and it’s basically impossible to take telephoto images without a tripod. It IS kind of a weird camera, because it’s larger than most bridge cameras and therefore not a great pick unless you specifically need the really long reach. Who needs that long reach? Wildlife and sports photographers. The auto-focus is nowhere near good enough for sports photographers, so they won’t be interested. And most wildlife photographers also need better focus abilities and I’ve noticed those that have the financial means love collecting big DSLR lens (I am included in this stereotype). Basically I’ve determined that the niche market for this camera is nonprofessional wildlife photographers suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome who sometimes just want to go for casual hikes that don’t focus on photography but who can’t not take a camera in case of Wildlife Photo Emergency. E.g.: me. As someone with a lot of experience hand-holding a 400 mm lens, I have little problem hand-holding this camera even when it’s zoomed out to the max, and I’m pretty good at being able to track things – a skill that does take a lot of practice and can be frustrating to those not used to it. And yes, the auto-focus is not great, but my expectations were very low and I found it to be a little better than I thought it would be.
That’s a lot more words than you generally read on here. But I wanted you to know that a lot of the photos you’ll be seeing featured here from now on may be taken with the new camera. However, a LOT of the images I post here are pretty bad image quality anyway; I’ve used this as a platform for showing wildlife and places I’ve seen around the Bay Area, rather than displaying my photography skills. Mostly because I don’t have enough high quality images to post every day, haha. So I doubt you will in most cases know just by looking which of my cameras any given picture you see here was taken with. Basically this too-long intro was to explain why the next couple of posts will be of more mundane things than the beautiful parks I usually show you. It’s because I’m running low on beautiful park photos and am stretching out some blog posts by showing you some of the test pictures I took with the Nikon. (Incidentally, my first-ever digital camera was also a Nikon Coolpix so I feel like I’ve gone full-circle here.)
This is my cat, Gomez, taken from bed the morning after I received the camera, as I was reading the manual online. Although I hate not having RAW capabilities, if I must shoot JPEG, I actually rather enjoy shooting in B/W mode as I have always loved B/W but don’t frequently do B/W conversion on my RAW images. And I just like viewing the scene in B/W before I even snap the photo…which the electronic viewfinder does for me.
This is the view from our back yard during sunset.
Trying to take a macro shot.
LOTS of flare with this camera, and no real ability to use a hood. Sometimes I like flare, though.
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