Normally this is the closest I can get to birds by the feeder. It doesn't work if I sit motionless and think peaceful thoughts...although it works for the cat (and she's NOT thinking peaceful thoughts!). It doesn't matter if I sit camouflaged under a large blanket...maybe they can hear the sweat pouring? It also doesn't work from inside the house since the camera's 3x zoom doesn't bring the birds close enough.
As I mentioned in last week's Canon A70 review the camera came with a remote control application. That gave me the idea of taking the bird pictures remotely, but the cable is only a couple feet long. So I bought a small USB hub, a ten foot cable, set the camera on a tripod, wired it to the hub, and snaked the USB cable in through a side window. Now I have complete control of the camera and, most importantly, the birds don't have to put up with me.
That's the setup, the only improvement would be a remote control pan and tilt mechanism. After taking a few snapshots I discovered a couple cool features in the software. One allows you to take a single snapshot after a predetermined time. Another let's you set a timed interval between shots along with how many shots to take. I set it up to take a picture every ten seconds until it took 60 of them.
Taking lots of random shots turned out much better than when I sat there trying to capture a perfect shot. It caught birds in mid-flight and moments that I might have seen but not been able to respond quickly enough to. Looking through a hundred some photos I noticed this funny pattern with a Mourning Dove and a Grosbeak. The photos have been re-arranged a little bit.
(It's an animated GIF in case you have that feature disabled)
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