So, since the last post, I’ve had a lot of time to practice with my new camera and learning manual zoom.

I am loving it.

Being able to zoom in and out at the speed I want without worrying about a tiny little motor feels amazing and the change in how I hold a camera now feels much better too!

This post will mostly be me just expanding on points I made previously, so let’s do that.

“…so perhaps I’ll have to save up for a lens like that.”

I was NOT expecting the lenses I’d need to be SO expensive.

One lens I’ve had my eye on is a 100-400mm and although that’s not even half of what I could do with my previous camera, I feel as though that is gonna be as good as I can get as that alone is over £700. Well, when it’s not on sale.

And then I looked at lenses that could go even further.. and..

yeeaahhh… I’m not getting one of these any time soon. And there’s lenses even more expensive than THAT.

“Probably gonna save up for one of those too, just a simple shotgun mic like from RØDE or something.”

I have since bought a microphone for the camera! I decided to get the RØDE VideoMicro ii. Works just fine, it does the job just fine.

Deciding where to put the wire was a bit difficult as I didn’t want it to by flying around everywhere so I’ve just wrapped it all around the red shock mount which then loops back into the microphone input.

One problem I am having with it, however, is that there’s just a lot of background noise, like a lot of static. I’ve tried to get around it by doing some noise reduction in Audacity but it’s so prominent that my voice ends up sounding robotic and unnatural, so that’s another thing I’ll have to figure out.

“…it seems this camera might be easier to set up for a webcam! … I believe you can just plug it into the PC and the software will pick it up.”

Yup! Using this camera as a webcam is actually really fun. You don’t even need Canon’s software anyway! Discord and OBS will just pick up the camera as its own thing which is pretty cool. I haven’t tried it out with the mini-HDMI at all but using the usb-c cable works extremely well so there’s no real need to change it.

“As I said, I haven’t gone out and actually used this camera yet…”

Well, now I have! As I mentioned earlier, using a zoom lens is really fun and getting used to using a new camera has not been hard at all!

These are some of my favourite shots I’ve gotten so far.

My process for editing my pictures isn’t too complex; since I take all my pictures in RAW, that makes all the pictures seem “desaturated”, so in editing I really bump up the saturation.

Thankfully for these type of shots, being full of colour actually looks pretty nice, especially the one with the bright green ball. I use a subtle denoise too, and that just helps to soften the image. And the last thing I do is add a soft vignette, actually desaturating the corners as well as making them slightly darker. I often do some cropping, but nothing too extreme as I don’t want to lose quality.

As a final note, as per my photography instagram, I mostly take pictures of planes, but I haven’t been able to go to an air show since getting this camera and I don’t have the correct lenses for such an occasion just yet, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to get some real nice pictures of them.