LATEST Photography & Digiscoping news
NEW Mike Wood Bird Carvings
A page and plenty of photos of the wonderful work of Mike Wood.
Canon announce
NEW Canon EOS 50D the expected replacement for the EOS 40D. The new Canon 50D has a 15.1 Megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor at the usual 1.6x crop, 6.3fps continuous shooting speed and ISO speeds ISO 100-3200, expandable to 12800. improved Self Cleaning Sensor Unit with a new fluorine coating – increases protection of image quality by helping to reduce, repel and remove unwanted dust from the sensor.
Canon EOS 1Ds MkIII 21.1 million pixels (full frame) 5fps and many of the benefits of the Canon 1D MkIII (this is the one for me!!)
Canon EOS 40D 10.1 million pixels 1.6x crop. 6.5fps and many of the features of the EOS 1D MkIII. Looks to be a great little camera for the bird photographer.
Canon EF800mm f/5.6L IS USM firm details released by Canon, bit more expensive than I imagined (hoped) at £8999.99 RRP inc. VAT / €13299.99 inc. VAT and June availability. Weight is 4.5kg See Canon release HERE
Nikon announce
NEW Nikon D90 12.3mp at 4.5fps. Competitive price and sure to be popular with bird photographers. ISO speeds up to 6400.
Nikon D3 12.1 million pixel full frame (new Nikon FX format). Lots of excellent features but for the bird photographer, you do wonder about 12mp at full frame.
Nikon D300 12.3 million pixels at 1.5x crop (familiar Nikon DX format). A new 3 inch monitor
Nikon super telephoto VR prime lenses finally announced.
AF-S 400mm f/2.8G ED VR
AF-S 500mm f/4G ED VR
AF-S 600mm f/4G ED VR
Sigma announce
New 150-500mm f5 - f6.3 O.S. lens. An image stabilised Bigma!! Sounds interesting. it is slightly longer and heavier than the current Bigma. With HSM and image stabilisation, this sounds like a very nice walkaround lens.
New 120-400mm f4.5 - f5.6 O.S. lens. This replaces the current 80-400mm O.S. lens.
Naturescape's Skimmer II - I have been using this for a couple of months, although opportunities are a little sparse due to weather and the fact that it's quite specialised in when it's appropriate to use. Nice exchange rate helped, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. There's not much to it, as you can guess, but it does the job very well and when you use the Wimberley C-10 clamp (as I do), you can't get down much lower