I started to enjoy taking photos of birds, I guess a tele objective would be a hell of fun. Sometimes I am lucky and the birds are very close, but the 18-105mm lens is not enough if they aren’t. Above you can see one example, I wish I could get closer to the bird no matter if the bird is too far away. Anyway, even if I am not close enough, there is something I like about this image. I did set it to black and white and darkened the image a lot.
Diary of Dennis 
I like the geometric simplicity of this image. A close-up is not always necessary!
True, I think the geometry is what I liked about the image too. But I cropped the image a little bit as I didn’t want the windows to be on the photo. I think it looked good after the cropping 🙂
I guess I can get closer to one particular bird perch near my window, although I definitely have struggles with getting more than silhouettes for birds. My strategy is RAW + HDR, which I’m betting you know about. I use Capture One, although Lightroom works too, and it’s a fairly quick process. The bird pictures on my post at http://littlechomper.com/2015/01/14/birds-sieze-control-of-the-little-chomper/ are the best I’ve managed so far. Still much duller than I’m happy with. Although recently, there was a pair of what I think were cardinals that flew by the window. Such unexpectedly bright streaks of red. I wonder if that would show up better 🙂
I am still not shooting in RAW as my hard drive is now dead end full. I need to buy a new one next week, I already have trouble to get jpegs down from the SD card. After some years I finally filled 500gb (well, I have a couple of big tools and games installed as well and then all the data). But after that I really want to try this out too as I have Lightroom and Photoshop as well.
With the bird photos, I was sometimes lucky and the picture was so sharp that I could heavily crop the image to get much closer if the bird was too far away, but that is not always working, however, I am still practicing as it is my first DSLR.
I think 10 – 30 meters is really working well with the 105mm lens and a medium sized bird but then it really gets difficult with this lens and the last chance is cropping and hoping that the results are good.
I think a 300mm tele lens would be a big jump, there are a couple of cheap ones but these are probably rather for sunny days as they are slower. The more light sensitive lenses are much more expansive.
Your bird photo looks still cool considering that I see on the photo that it was quite cloudy. 🙂
I thought RAW was going to be too disk/bandwidth intensive too, but it wasn’t. My SONY RX100M3 is only spitting out 20MB RAW photos… For some reason, I thought they were going to be 50MB each. 20MB is a no brainer. Not much bigger than the high quality JPEGs, which were up to 13MB or more. Suddenly I could take that dark smudge of a bird, slide the “Shadows” slider, and see lots of feathers. I’m sorry, but it’s time you switched to RAW, especially if you already have Lightroom. That bird pic I took also had overexposed clouds, and by sliding the “highlights” slider, I was suddenly able to see “stuff in the sky” rather than just a white sheet. It makes photography so much more rewarding. I was “one of you” before. Now it’s time you join me and become “one of them” 😀 I do agree that the 300mm tele lens will help a lot though. I’m working with a silly fixed lens. One day I might switch over to more of a “pro” camera. I love portability, but trying to take indoor cat “action” pictures is quite a challenge without a bigger sensor. Do I want to extend the depth of field? Do I want to up the shutter speed? Oh no… it looks like I’m going to have to let the ISO creep over 1000 again. My camera doesn’t like that. Oh well. Tired of that internal struggle 🙂
I believe it, saw some RAW editing videos on YouTube. I am really interested in RAW as I love the whole editing process and I see the benefits of RAW files. I will join you very soon 😉 Anyway, need to reinstall Windows soon due to the new hard drive, so, I won’t do much experiments before that as I install everything freshly anyway next week. I will only sort some folders and files over the next days.
You make a good point about DSLR cameras. The first thing I learned is something I do now call the “DSLR paradox”… one day you go through a beautiful park and see a dozen of squirrels, the next day you take your camera with you to visit the park again and to take pictures of the squirrels, but they are not there anymore 😛 Now take this and add another subject like “cats” or what not… if you search them, you won’t find them. If you have the DSLR not with you, they eventually cross your way. That is the problem about DSLR’s.
On the other side, you mentioned it, you can really customize much more settings with a DSLR, it gives you really creative freedom anyhow (Although I am not that far yet, lol, still using program and auto modes).
I don’t regret that I bought the DSLR, once I understand everything, it’ll be a lot of fun. But a modern small high-end system camera has it’s place too. If money would grow in my wallet while I sleep, I would buy both a small high-end system camera and a pro DSLR. I would find application for both 🙂 I love the small Sony cameras and would always have one in my pocket, much superior to phone cameras. I especially loved the reviews of the Sony Alpha 6000, it comes really close to DSLR’s already with picture quality. These system cameras are already extremely good.