Any photographers in the house?

Very cool, I think I'll give it a try and see how it goes. It's pretty nice that it can make such good panos even with handheld.

F*cking yellow jackets. Mantises are cool at least.

Pretty!

These aren't good photos but they are kinda fun. I would need a better telephoto lens to get decent wildlife photos. On these ones, I had to do a little digital zoom on some of them, and all the hummingbird ones are through a window.

We have a fox squirrel or two that live in the backyard. Super cute and fun. They seem to be pretty territorial and are very noisy and rambunctious in late morning and early afternoon. I put up a squirrel feeder for them and one of them tries to chase everything away.

We cleaned and filled a hummingbird feeder that was left at the house, and a pair of Anna's Hummingbirds instantly claimed the territory. I think there was another one that tried to come in and fight over it. We have another feeder to put up eventually. This is the male. When he's turned away from you, you can't hardly see any of the iridescent feathers.

When he's facing you, though, his pink feathers are GORGEOUS. Definitely has the quality of color like those birds of paradise in Planet Earth.

We put up a (hopefully) squirrel-proof bird feeder, and there are black-capped chickadees, juncos, stellar's jays, varied thrushes, nuthatches, flickers, and hopefully many more to be spotted.

Now that I'm vaxxed, I'm back at my office and hitting my old lunchtime walk:

I recently was able to pick up a used copy of the Fuji 80mm macro. After seeing the snow on the tree's outside this morning I just had to go out and grab some shots before it all melted.

I took a few pictures for work and this one is my favorite:

Along with a couple others:

I may have asked before, but does anybody have recommendations for a decent photographic negative/slide scanner? Preferably under $200, I have thousands of negatives and slides, but I don't need them to be gallery quality images. The reviews I read range from 5 stars and people loving it, to 1 star and people calling them crap (I guess that's with everything though.) Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I took some quite nice snail pics on this morning's walk. The rain had driven them out onto the path.

They were tiny. I’m amazed how clear the detail on their skin, etc is. I think it must have been the perfect natural lighting.

Hi Teneman, I have a few years of experience with mirrorless cameras, since switching from DSLRs. My last DSLR was a Canon 40D with a bunch of lenses. I'd been happy with my Canon setup for a long time and was considering an upgrade when I read about the mirrorless cameras. After a good amount of research, I decided to buy one of the smaller and more compact options to try out and use as a backup/travel camera. I went for the Fujifilm X-E2 (the current version is X-E4) and I was delighted with the photos and enjoyed using the camera a lot.

After trying out that camera for a few months I sold all my Canon gear (yes the lenses too!) and bought the Fujifilm XT-2 with three lenses. The camera handles like a dream, it has a lot of manual dials and buttons (I learned photography with those, so I quickly got used to using them and enjoying the tactile control). You can also change settings using the digital display. I mostly shoot RAW but the J-peg's from the Fujifilm cameras are great, as they mirror the original FujiFilm stock very accurately. Fujifilm also supports its cameras with new features via firmware for a long time after release.

I do use some non-Fujifilm lenses on the XT-2, an ultra-wide third-party lens, and a number of old manual focus lenses with an adapter. I expect your Canon EF/EF-S lenses would work ok with a mirrorless camera, but ultimately I expect you would want to migrate to the system lenses eventually. That way you would get the full camera features and the weight/size benefits.

Some of the main benefits of mirrorless:

- The gear is so much lighter, mostly down to the lenses being much smaller. I often put the camera and one lens into a small camera bag and throw it into a backpack on my travels. I can still take my larger bag with three lenses and other bits & pieces on long walks without it getting too heavy.

- The cameras are so much quieter. No loud mirror, just a small click from the shutter. And, most have a digital shutter option so you can even use the camera silently. I've used it this way for film & theatre shoots when you have to be silent.

- Video is great although I don't use video so much. I believe it's better now for the more recent cameras and some brands were better than Fujifilm (I think Sony?).

I hope some of my feedback helps with your decision. If your current system is serving you well and you just need a bump in quality from a new camera body (making use of your current lenses), perhaps sticking with the Canon DSLR system is fine for now. If you like the sound of the benefits I mentioned, perhaps consider doing what I did and getting a cheaper second-hand mirrorless camera to try out to see if you enjoy it. If you do, you may end up eventually selling your whole Canon kit and going the mirrorless route

Thanks Neutrino and Tangle, that's some excellent information. I've been a Canon shooter since... well a reeeaaally long time ago, so the idea of trying out a Fuji seems somewhat sacrilegious. Even so, that X-E2 looks like a great way to test out the mirrorless arena, and may be something I give a shot.

In the meantime, Adorama came through and a new EOS 90D with 18-135mm kit lens arrived this afternoon. Battery is charging up now, I'm looking forward to taking some test shots!

Teneman, the DSLR cameras are sadly looking like they are going away. I don't think development dollars are going to get spent on them, so as time goes by they'll fall further and further behind.

I'm a Sony mirrorless shooter (upgrading from Nikon 3100 way back when, currently on a Sony A7IV), BTW

Mirrorless has a couple major party tricks that give it certain advantages - since the viewfinder is a tiny monitor, you get to see exactly what the exposure etc will do to your photos. As others have mentioned getting rid of the mirror makes the camera slimmer, with trickle-down effects for the lenses, meaning everything can be smaller and lighter.

Used to be the drawbacks were that a EVF was pretty poor resolution, and could be laggy (optical of course, was true to life and no lag at all). The other issue was that since the camera was reading out from the sensor all the time to display on the EVF, battery life was poor. Both of those issues have largely gone by the way side, though I have heard some wildlife photographers who prefer optical viewfinder since any lag at all can make framing/anticipating challenging.

Ultimately, in a few years we probably won't have much of a choice - it'll be all mirrorless.

yeah that kinda sucks. Remember reading their site religiously back in the days of DSLRs. Seems extra cruel that they would delete the whole thing rather than keeping the content up.