Today we had a photo class at the Oregon Zoo which was being hosted by Ritz Camera and Camera World. P had purchased a camera from Camera World and with each purchase you are given vouchers for free classes which are posted at Ritz Camera University. The zoo one was a paid class however for $25 a person which included a coupon for a free $25 photo book that you can design yourself, so really you paid for the book and got the lessons for free.
At first I was a little hesitant about staying for it since everyone in the group had nice SLR cameras and all I had was my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5K 9MP Digital Camera with 10x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black)
At first I was taking photos using the default settings that the camera came with until I finally asked one of the trainers, A.J. (I keep wanting to call him Robby for some reason) looked at it and walked me through some changes which I think made a huge difference in the picture quality.
In the below pictures you will probably be able to tell when I made the changes as the quality increased some:I also took a few videos with the camera which I’ll just post a couple. The first one is of a lorikeet feeding on some nectar while on my arm here:
And this is one of a giraffe that had a very itchy ear and was using his feeder to scratch it:
One thing I also tried fooling around with was the burst shot mode on the camera. These are all photos of some bats that I took using the burst shot mode and then spliced them all together using Microsoft Movie Maker. It turned into an odd, hypnotic film…the chewing is so weird looking:
