Paul Lester Photo

This past weekend I was in West Palm Beach, FL as well as Freeport, Grand Bahamas. I was on my first cruise ever. I took with me, one camera, my P-510. If I have not said it before, I love this camera! Sure, it has its limitations, but if you learn to be patient with it, you will be rewarded.

When Deb and I returned from our cruise, we went to the zoo the next day. I was toting the Nikon P-510 with me, figuring, quite correctly, that I’d be able to make good use of the 1000mm zoom lens.

Throughout the time that we were there, I shot with it at maximum zoom, as much as I could. Happily, it never let me down. There were times when I had to be realllllllllyyyy patient with the zoom because the conditions were somewhat dark and the zoom tends to ‘hunt’ in low-contrast situations. Also, something else that I need to be careful with is low-light situations. The camera has a fantastic vibration reduction mode; however, shooting at 1/15 second at 1000 mm is not advised, though I was able to pull of some of those shots. I should have moved up the ISO or gone with auto-ISO so that I could have gotten better shutter speeds. I had to delete quite a few due to blurriness because of low shutter speeds. With sensors this small, depth of field is rarely a decision. However, at 1000 mm, you still get a fairly shallow DOF.

I thought that I’d share a few of those pictures here. The cool thing to note here is that two of the photos were shot through a chain-link fence: The tiger and the eagle. The Komodo Dragon was shot through glass. The AF had no problem with either situation.