SnowFella

Nikon P900, 28-2000mm equivalent focal length lens and some digital zoom can indeed work wonders but comes with it's can of worms. It's a 4.3-357mm lens that "gains" that range through crop factor as it has an itty bitty little sensor and it's also a relatively slow lens so you would be hard pushed shooting darker scenes. Plus it's CDAF focusing so it's prone to hunting back and forth to gain a lock as opposed to PDAF in a DSLR that generally locks first try.

No luck with my little friend, been taking shots of the above bird and it's offspring for over a year now but today he/she was nowhere to be found. Instead had a very relaxing time hunting some local Welcome Swallows, if you want to test your reflexes it's a worthy challenge!

Looking it up it seems like it ought to mount and autofocus on a Canon body, had it been Nikon it would of been a whole other can of worms. It's an older design though (Sigma did 2 170-500mm lenses, one APO Aspherical and one APO DG...more or less same design but the DG had updated coatings on the elements) and won't have any form of optical stabilization. Will make it a handful to shoot handheld, bit lighter than my lens but at 1.3kg it's still a big lump of glass & plastic/metal to haul around and shoot. But from a tripod that's a moot point. Bit of a disclaimer, never used anything but a Sony camera so got no hands on familiarity with the D3300 and that Sigma. Time to break my gear out for a little walk here, hopefully find my favorite little subject again...Azure Kingfishers. Got this shot around a month ago and keep on going back to the same reserve with the hope that it will allow me to get this close again.

Cheers Rocky. Shot it using my Sony A77 and a Sigma 150-500mm lens from a tripod. Usually "cheat" and let the camera figure out shutter speed using spot metering on the moon rather than try and dial it in by hand. This was 500mm, 1/400sec, F/8 and ISO100...near full moon so it's rather bright. Fired off 14 shots as quick as the camera could shoot them. Processing was rather simple. First a bit of a crop in Lightroom and exported all the files as full resolution jpg's. Next step really is the key, imported the lot into Registax (free astro stacking software) and combined them all together. A single shot holds a fair bit of detail, and noise, but by combining several shots that detail is enhanced and noise removed. Saved the result and brought it back into LR for a closer crop and a few minor changes. Registax is a little tricky to use but well explained, along with download links and settings, in this tutorial starting around the 4:30 mark.

Better late than never, gone from hobby modder to hobby photographer in the last few years. Mainly birder and landscape but having a long lens handy the moon is never to far away 12 image stack out of a 500mm lens, worst time of the month to get a moon shot as full moon = least contrast.

Lets re-awaken this from the dead. Since giving up 3D work a few years back I've in the last year or so taken up bird photography quite by accident. Spending an afternoon in the local ER just over a year ago with luckily false heart attack symptoms prompted me to change a few things, like heading out for regular walks rather than turn into a couch potato. Bringing a camera along came naturally and in no-time I realized how fun chasing little things with feathers was. Only had an old Sony A350 and 200mm as longest lens at that stage but that's all changed with some new additions. Sony A77 with VG and a new Sigma 150-500 lens...likely have a few lenses to many nowadays to be honest, think there's well over a dozen sitting on the shelf

2 random's from the last week or so. First just a test shot using a recently bought classic Minolta lens that unfortunately turned up fungus infested, going to have to shell out to have it professionally cleaned Second one taken yesterday at a local botanical garden me and the wife stopped in at after having picked up another piece of vintage Minolta AF glass. Both taken with nearly 30 year old Minolta glass, 75-300mm "Big Beercan" for the first and 35-70mm "Baby Beercan" for the second

Single shot from a trip up the mountains this week, was at the right place at the right time to capture some rainbow effects from one of the local falls. Got a heap more photos aswell but this is the only one I've run through some post work on, going to dig into the other ones this afternoon.

Nice cholla and yucca's Led! I'd love to go for a visit to those parts of the states but that's just a pipedream that likely never will happen, I'll have to make do with my own little slice of desert in the backyard Here's a straight cut and paste from a post in another forum outligning this afternoons antics. Having recently picked up 2 older telezooms to go along with my long kitlens I figured that for and giggles I'd set them up side by side for a straight out of the camera comparison. They are more or less 3 decades worth of Alpha mount zoom's, only more or less as 2 were released back in the 80's and the kitlens around 2007. Here's the 3 lenses in question. Left to right: Sony DT 55-200/4-5.6 (released 2007), Minolta AF 100-300/4.5-5.6 (released 1988) and Minolta AF 70-210/4 (released 1985) 70-210 much longer than the rest but both the others extend when zooming, the oldtimer stays the same length through the whole range..it can also manage f4 through the whole range as opposed to the others. Mounted to my oldish Sony A350 that sat on a tripod I metered out an exposure at f5.6, dialed in the resulting exposure into the manual mode in order to get identical settings for all 3 and shot a single frame at both 100mm and 200mm using all 3 lenses on the same focus point. Here's the 2 shots from the Sony DT 55-200/4-5.6, straight out of the camera and just resized to 800px wide. Minolta AF 100-300/4.5-5.6 results And the oldest of the bunch, Minolta AF 70-210/4, backed it off a tad from the max 210 but still ended up a fraction closer than the previous 2. Hard to really see a difference in these relatively small images so heres 2 better comparisons. The "wide" angle of things, Sony on the left, Minolta 70-210 in the middle and Minolta 100-300 on the right. And even more telling, a close crop of the 200mm shots (70-210 frame scaled down to 98% to match) Animated .gif to make it more apparent but forgot to set it to run over and over again so you might have to reload it to get the effect. Have to say I prefer the old 70-210 in both colour and sharpness, plus it's built like a tank (think I could hammer nails with it without ill effect). Just a shame it weighs more than the camera itself so it feels seriously nose heavy. Going to attempt the same thing again later on but with something set in direct sunlight, this afternoons focal point was in the shade.

Been a while since this thread was active, time to kick it back into life I guess. "new" camera gear I've added to the collection lately. 18-70 kitlens I had blew it's AF gears so I went ebay hunting. Added 2 more lenses aswell but these 2 are classic around 20 year old glass. Minolta 35-70mm f4 front and Minolta 70-210mm f4 at the back. 70-210 came with a busted aperature and needed some DIY surgery in order to come back to life again, just the aperature arm that had come loose from the iris pin so it was relatively simple.

I'd have to dig through my old GR files to see if I can find it, though from memory it isn't hard to line up a holsterpoint properly as it simply snaps to a bone in the character skeleton. All you need is a character model with the helper placed and lined up with the bone, from memory it was the torso bone. Merge in the character and helper and rotate both untill the weapon sits where you want it to sit and then delete the character mesh. Leaves the helperpoint in the correct position.

All you need is the old holsterpoint.3ds file or Earl's GR Handplacement tool. The holsterpoint one is a simple one step merge and you have a holsterpoint where it originally is in the game while Earl's tool easily lets you rotate it around to different positions.

Yup, did most of the weapon models that have been shown to date plus a few other bits here and there.

I surface now and again mate Got busy working for John Sonedecker so GR and other work went on the wayside.

I wouldn't move any of the bones around to see if it's attached. They need to be where they are when you export or expect some funky results! Just move 1 frame forwards in the keyframe slider instead'