Can you say exciting?!! It is so great to be out of winter here in Erie. This weekend is the Allegany Nature Pilgrimage in New York State and I’m so looking forward to meeting new people (especially the bird and nature bloggers) and seeing some again that I’ve already met. I look forward to the Night Walk and hope to see some owls. My camera has night shot so I’m looking forward to trying it out. It is suppose to take pictures with an infra red light in total darkness. When not totally dark (0lux) it has some kind of ISO settings to take photos in color with very little light. I’ll have to test its limits. The infra red light will only go so far.

And the final reservations were made yesterday for my summer vacation. It includes Minneapolis, Mille Lacs Lake, Duluth and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I expect to see some really exciting animals, birds and vistas. The Porcupine Mountains area, where we will stay for most of the vacation, is really, really, wild. I’m a little concerned about the black bears but from what I read, they don’t harm people if you leave them alone and don’t happen to come across a cub. So as long as we don’t have a close encounter with bears, snakes or Bigfoot, we should have a blast.

A real plus along the way and one of the most exciting parts of my vacation will be meeting Lynne, of the Hasty Brook blog. We plan on meeting for coffee while I am in Minneapolis and maybe squeeze in a little birding at a nearby park. We also will be going right by her “Hasty Brook” and plan to stop to see the beautiful area on our way to Duluth.

My tele conversion lens was delivered yesterday for my camera. I’ll have more zoom than ever. If I have time today, I’ll try and get out and take some shots to see how well it performs. The problem I have with super duper telephoto is trying to find the right area in the viewfinder. Everything is so close up you don’t know if you are looking at the right tree branch or tree for that matter. You just have to zoom all the way out and then zero in on the bird when zooming back in and hope the bird or whatever is still there. My camera’s zoom is 15X optical and 2X digital for a total of 30X. The equivalent to 465mm according to the specs on the Sony site. So in theory my tele lens VCL-DH1774 by Sony should give me a 739.5mm equivalent zoom or 51X. We’ll see how well it does. But I have faith it should be pretty good because Sony does make good lenses. The Sony H50 does NOT take decent photos with my spotting scope no matter what setting I use it on. The little point and shoot cameras can focus in so much better, why I don’t know. But my H50 will be great for all other photographing when we don’t don’t feel like carrying along the spotting scope.