My comment didn't post

so it gets to be a post to garner comment.

ironic.





okay I'm going to try to do this... bear with me, for I am somewhat intoxicated.

Why Liberty Reservoir? Because I went driving and that's where I ended up. I had never seen either the sparrow nor what I believe to be the warbler before, so it paid off.

Considering other locations: once I have the time and money to take good film and the car up to SQH state park, I'm going there... don't worry. I wanted to go there yesterday but I decided against it when I realized I didn't have the disposable for it. I'll keep the others in mind, though. WINK!

The square cropping I would say is entirely incidental to the amount of crap in my frames, but really it's partially chance and partially preference. I take a lot of pictures largely for "hey look at that" and if it happens to fall in a square, I'd rather keep it to that. I think part of the problem is that I want to crop to "desktop picture" aspect, so I can use them later. The film grain is inherent to the budget fuji I use; I've been shooting ISO 400 superia for ... well, just about 8 months now. It's been "good to me" but not quite as much so as the Max 800 from Kodak used to be. Shutter/F-stop is up for grabs. The only thing I remember is taht I mid-roll changed the one with the goose head going all the way up to the sparrow. They're not sequential in this gallery, but it's possible if A) you remember when you took the roll out and B) advance to the "same" place + a frame or two (I blanked two) for the retake. The goose, duck, and birds in flight were all taken with my smc-Pentax 135 f/3.5; it was very late afternoon (i.e. 4:30 or so), so there was not much available light, and as you say yourself, it was cloudy. All things considered, I think they turned out well, though with the houses in the background, I would never "publish" them. Shutter speed is beyond my recollection, though I will guess for the earlier it was between 1/90 and 1/500. When I was at liberty, I was all over the place; I went from 1/90 on a couple shots on that roll (the BARE minimum for my f/5.6 210 + 2x teleconverter) all the way up to 1/2000 (that I remember). Not all of them made it intot he gallery, obviously; I chose the ones I did primarily for "look at that bird" or composition. The ladybugs are a prime example of lessons learned. the two 24mm macro shots are much too dark, in my opinion, as well as being subject to flare. I know now that I need to pay special attention to keeping sun off the convex element on the back of the lenses when I reverse macro like that.

A second problem with "the way I do things" is that my 80-210 goes over whatever my camera's internal limit for autofocus or even AF/assist is I'm entirely on my own for those; if I were to start using my MX exclusively with the teleconverter, I'd be much better off; first, its finder is a pentaprism, .95 magnification .95 FOV, and it's a LOT brigher than the ZX-L. the problem with it, of course, is that my hands are too weak to turn the shutter knob quickly. I'm forced to choose between ease of exposure or ease of focus. I need to keep my zooms on the MX and the primes on the ZX-L. I think that'll give me the best results. Unfortunately, it took you pointing that out to convince me to change my ways. Heh.

A corrolary to most of this: if I had been using ISO 800 I probably would have gotten better focus at the lake. Considering that I was going one stop slow and most of those were "most of the way" there, the extra f of aperture might have been the difference (if used with the MX, obviously). I don't have time to DOF preview the birds, for obvious reasons, but I get away with a lot more of that because of the nature of my tastes: I shoot a lot of still stuff now that I do macro stuff.

Now, a final consideration on film speed: I don't have the time and expenditure to go with 100 or HQ 400 on the free days I have, most of which correspond to the worst days weatherwise to take pictures. With the ISO 1600, I was able to get close enough to the pictures that mattered that the grain was ancilliary; with the prints, they look old but the detail still shows up; with the negatives, whatever- they'll be digitized and shared as 1600 ISO. For me, it's less the appearance of the picture itself than it is what I've taken a picture of. As long as the limitations of the film aren't greater than what I want to try to convey, then it doesn't matter. You're right that I need to get a larger format camera and play around with it, but I have a lot invested in 135 at the moment, so I'm inclined to be cheap and lazy and continue to pay for my mistakes and adjust strategy because of it (i.e. find an additional body cap, cut ou the middle, and fashion a crude hood out of it to reduce flare for reverse macro pictures).