Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Gift Recommendations

My first Holiday Gift Recommendations. You have to get ready for Cyber Monday.


1) Last year I bought Wingscapes's Bird Cam and enjoyed it. The only trouble was I'm not nearly as interested in birds as I am with plants and ants. It has other uses of course. I tried it out and liked it a lot. It's just there wasn't enough at the feeder to really hold my interest to keep up viewing. My first time using it, it was full of photos with terrible lighting. So time of day and angle are something that have to be learned from use. I wasn't about to edit 80 photos to find out if there were birds there. Sometimes it took pictures of someone walking by doing yard work. The Birdcam 2.0 has a flash though so this wouldn't have been a problem.

Second try though was much more successful. The lighting was better and we got one or two good bird pictures. I didn't keep them though because I thought they were nothing special. Finding that brilliant bird pic though is bound to happen, and an avid bird watcher is more likely to use this camera daily. It also does video which I don't think I ever got around to trying.

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2) Because of the success of their first camera, they've also released a Plant Camera. I'm happy to see the much cheaper price. The emphases here is more on time laps photos. You can do time laps on both cameras of course, but I believe the Plant Cam actually converts it into one big video. I don't own this one but I would assume it has a better lens for closeups. Might be good to see what butterflies are showing up plants too. I could personally see using this to capture ants excavating tunnels or possibly setup a bee swarm in an observation hive.

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