UncleMungo - Nature Photographer

Not!

Well, I had my big chance and blew it. Picture the scene, we had popped into the garden to put Riff-Raff back in his hutch after giving him his antibiotics when we saw our resident hedgehog snuffling around the lawn, apparently completely oblivious to our presence on the patio just feet away. Oblivious that is until I ran inside and got my camera to take some pictures of it. I managed to scare it off with various camera starting up and focusing noises although fortunately it did come back. So, there I was in position, the outside light was on which should have given me a fighting chance of getting a picture, but no. I just couldn't set a wide enough aperture to get an exposure of less than a second or two, even at higher ISOs. Of course, I don't have a tripod either and the hedgehog was hardly staying still for me. All I managed to get was a blurry garden with a ghostly shape or two. Eventually I was banned from trying as I managed to scare it again with the shutter noise. Result: a total washout.

But it seems, nature wasn't done with me yet. When we got in the house there was an impressively big spider lurking in the corner of the dressing room and brushing my earlier disappointment to one side I once again leaped into action. This time I was able to use one of my Father-In-Law's close up lenses to allow me to get really up close and personal with the spider. Well kind of, it was right in the corner of the room, up by the ceiling, so I had to hold the camera up at arms length but luckily the excellent Sony Live View feature came to the rescue so I could actually still see the spider and focus on it. Unfortunately though almost exactly the same thing happened as with the hedgehog. Even though I was indoors with the lights on I still couldn't get a decent shot. It's not as if the spider was running around either. Flash was no use as I was too close and the ceiling is white so even with the flash stopped right down and the shutter as fast as possible I couldn't get a shot that wasn't just a total white mess. Without the flash I needed a shorter but still fairly significant 0.6 second exposure which is a long time to hold still without wobbling. I tried employing a Hejpod but she couldn't stand still enough for me and swapped lenses and close-up lenses but I'm still not convinced I got a good shot.

OK, I did at least manage to get some shots that looked all right on the LCD, I won't know how good they really are until I look at them on a big screen. So all in all I felt pretty deflated. I could really, really, do with a wide aperture lens.

The only thing is, that although I really love my Alpha 350, it's a brilliant first DSLR for someone like me who is moving up from a compact camera, I'm not 100% sure I want to stick with Sony. The newer cameras they've produced have been a bit poor (according to the reviews for example, the 380 which is supposedly the new model upgrade to mine is in fact a downgrade in almost every area) and the Sony's, even the really expensive ones, seem to be much weaker in bad light in general than the competition with a lot of noise at higher ISOs and a rather brutal noise reduction programme which removes photgraphic detail as well as noise. Unfortunately, it seems I almost always take pictures in bad light. Now, a wide aperture lens would mitigate that a lot but do I want to start investing in Sony lenses which would effectively lock me into the Sony system if I know I might be better off switching to one of the other systems to get good results for low light shots? Especially since I already know that's what I generally shoot. I'm awaiting with interest the reviews of the new 550 which seems like it could be a proper upgrade for the 350.

What a dilemma. Of course, it could be that by the time I am looking to upgrade they've fixed all that stuff, but that's not going to help me take awesome pictures of hedgehogs tomorrow night. Or whenever the next time we see it is.

Don't get me wrong here, I would still chose the 350 as my first DSLR even now, I suppose this would be made a little easier if I knew how much better my low-light results would be with a better lens. If I can get good results without needing to switch to higher ISOs none of this is an issue. Arrgg. If only the lenses weren't so damn expensive.

UPDATE: Sony do seem to be aware of the noise issues and are touting the 550 as having much better performance in this area. Maybe I don't need to worry after all.