Tuesday 11 October 2011

Digiscoping Blues, Malaysia

I'm off tomorrow to Malaysia where I hope to do a little pelagic birdwatching in Kedah, north west Malaysia and spend a few days in Ulu Muda National Park on the Thai-Malay border. This is home to many exotic bird species including Plain-pouched Hornbill. I made contact with Dave Bakewell, a British birder based in Malaysia and Dave very kindly has steered me in this direction.  You can read a report of Dave's visit to Ulu Muda last month at this link. I'll hopefully tell you a lot more about it after next weekend.

I spent today in Bangkok trying to find a replacement camera following last week's debâcle. Nikon can  repair my P6000 but at a cost of 20,000 THB, about £400.00 GBP - ouch, no thanks. Unfortunately the camera is now obsolete;  but I did see a store in Bangkok selling it off brand new for 12,999 THB less than a month ago. So a replacement is the order of the day and I rather fancied the Panasonic G3 with a 14-42 mm lens. I tried it out today with the Kowa 25x LER and the 20-60x zoom eyepieces but I could not eliminate vignetting at any focal length on either lens. So I left it for today.

I think the solution is probably to use  the Kowa 30x wide angle eyepiece and then I'll be able to use the Panasonic lenses. Fortunately I have my old Nikon P5100 as backup and that will have to do for Malaysia and for the immediate future. So no pics or birdwatching but I am looking forward to my trip. Watch this space.

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