Camera opinions

Ok I picked up a couple more lenses at the pawn shop today. They are Tamron and kind of middle of the road lenses as far as quality but they only cost a hundred between the both of them.

Tamron 19-35mm 1:3.5-4.5 Macro

Tamron 70-300mm 1:4-5.6 Telephoto macro (1:2)

While these are not top of the line lenses, I don't have the cash for the pro grade and they came at just the right price. Here is what I was experimenting with today and the new pieces of glass!

I took these on my lunch and breaks at work, I hope your guys enjoy!

Oh man, I would die for a shot of that eagle around here! Right now I'm hunting for a pair of pealated woodpeckers that have taken residence in and around our town. (My old science teacher will publish it in the local county paper with his artical about not cutting down so many trees in the area like the town has been because these critters are trying to repopulate the region.)
Excellent shots my friend!

Wow, you captured nice subjects!

I like the first one. It could use a longer focal length to zero in on the bird a bit more, but I guess you alredy zoomed all the way in... It is hard to catch a bird in flight (and focus correctly) so good job there!

The second one is close enough, but I have never seen such a bad example of CA on any lens before. Is this a crop or the whole image?

The third one would be golden if it was not for the camera shake. Too bad, so cool colors.

I like to take pictures of birds, but I don't know that much about most of what is in the lower 48. I know what is in our area, Eagles, Crows, Falcons, Owls, Robins, Magpies and various types of ducks and grease. As for the Eagles, they are easy, the only thing more populous is probably ducks or crows. depends on the time of year.

On the first one he was actually so close that I had to zoom back in to find him in the sky and focus on him.

On the second one, what is CA? No I did not crop the image, he was pretty close, He was in a pretty thick set of trees with the sun setting almost directly behind him, I could not get back to the other side to take a picture because there is a river on the other side of the tree...I wanted a better shot of him, but there was no angle that was better than that one, I took maybe 50 pictures and that was about the best one.

for the 3rd shot, that was actually the worst of the bunch, I will replace it tomorrow, I was taking pictures through a chain link fence and occasionally I would get one out of focus.

Look for more eagles in the future, I found a few nests in and around the same area on my lunch (one of the glories of living in a rural area) and will be returning on my day off when I am not so time constrained to try for more shots.

I am still learning this stuff so if you guys have tips let er rip! The most recent one that a friend gave me was from his sniper training. I have a notebook with my camera now so that I can record setting I used, the lighting conditions etc. for each shot so I can keep track of what works.

CA stands for chromatic aberation. It usually shows at high contrast borders (light-dark). In your picture it shows at tree branches - the purple fringing. You can do nothing about it, it is a property of the lens (obviously this one is very bad in that regard). Sometimes it gets better if you open the aperture.

As for noting settings, you do know that every picture you take allredy has embeded a lot of information in itself, right? It is called EXIF info and contains details like ISO setting, aperture, shutter time, focus mode, exposure mode, flash fired or not, exposure compensation and on and on and on...

Yes, I have recently become aware of that, the things that I am recording in the note pad are the external factors that have less to do with the camera settings and more to do with tripod use, or other external factors that would have helped or hindered.

An example is the other day I was at the glacier playing around with color temp and exposure on the ice and a cold wind came up, I was dressed a little lightly and was having trouble holding the camera steady (shivering). After some experimentation, I made a miniature "tripod" out of rocks and used the timer, because the pictures were all low, it gave a very different effect than most of my pictures. the other things that I might record include filter use (just starting to play with those) and if I have a very small subject, where it is. like yesterday I took some pictures of some mountain goats on the mountain. They are small enough that you have to digitally zoom quite a bit to tell what they are.