Shades 09-04-2004

This is the first trip I've taken with my new Nikon Coolpix 5700, so in addition to capturing some nice pictures I wanted to take some shots that would push the camera's limits to see how it would hold up. As you can see below, it performed quite well on a number of difficult shots, ranging from coping with excessive contrast in many of the sunlit pictures to extreme closeups and telephoto shots. The camera was mounted on a tripod for all pictures and the self-timer was used almost exclusively (no more blurry pictures due to camera movement). No photo editing was performed save resizing images or cropping (in the case of the hornet nest and skink closeups).

The tripod I have is a cheap consumer camcorder tripod with a three-way camera head on it and despite the poor reviews that both cheap lightweight tripods and three-way tripod heads get, I had no problems with either one. The only thing necessary to consistently shoot exceptional pictures from a cheap tripod is some sort of shutter release mechanism; in this case, I just used the three second shutter delay built into the camera.

Click on the thumbnails to view large images.