More Young'uns

This immature Northern Cardinal has been showing up near the feeder lately. Still being fed occasionally by the male adult. There's another even younger one I've seen but no decent shot of it yet.

More Like It

These kinds of shots are more like what I wanted from the full frame 5D. This is a Northern Catalpa tree blossom.

EOS 5D is not for Wildlife

I mentioned I picked up a full frame 5D recently. I took it out this morning with my 400 5.6 just to see how it performed looking for deer and birds on Peebles Island.

I found the AF to be far less effective than my 50D bodies. I also missed the reach of the 1.6 crop factor of the 50Ds.

As I was walking back to the car, under a berry tree of some sort, I noticed a bunch of Cedar Waxwings and Evening Grosbeaks feeding on the unripened berries. If you can identify the tree, please leave a comment.

I might have gotten some nice shots if I had the 400 hooked up to the 50D but the quick moving birds, in and out of the branches, were a bit much for the six year old technology of the 5D.

Here is a somewhat cropped shot of one of the Waxwings.

I like the texture and full frame scope of the 5D but I think I'll limit its use to landscapes and macros for the most part.

High Falls, Rochester, with iPhone 4

High Falls, on the Genesee River in downtown Rochester, New York is a terrific photo opportunity. High Falls is in the shadow of the historic Kodak building, as well as the Genesee brewery.

Last June I visited with my DSLR, you can see the photos here.

Today, I revisited with just my iPhone. This image was taken using the Pro HDR app. I rested the phone on the railing of the pedestrian bridge extremely worried that I would somehow drop it hundreds of feet into the gorge.

Success

The spots you can see at the top of this morning's photo of the falls are now gone.  Here's the proof.

Full Frame Body

I recently picked up a used full frame Canon EOS 5D body to augment my crop frame bodies. Below is a HDR image of Cohoes Falls I made yesterday morning.

The HDR was created from three images bracketing +/- 2 stops using HDR Darkroom software which I downloaded from the Mac App Store. I then cleaned up the resulting JPG in Canon's Digital Photo Pro, increasing contrast, sharpness and saturation to create the image seen below.

The base images were taken with my 70-200 zoom with polarizer at 70mm at f/20. The shutter speeds ranged from 1/25 to .4 seconds.

I did notice, however, that the 5D has some sensor dust which I hope I can remove with a blower.