Hands-On Experience: Olympus D620L

• Single-lens reflex or SLR — an absolute must for close-up photography, especially of live subjects. The photographer can view the subject through the lens, providing better focus than what could be achieved viewing an electronic viewfinder. When tracking a moving subject, the camera lens is the photographer's eye, and with SLR you don't get the motion artifacts that you see when viewing an electronic viewfinder while moving the camera at the same time.
• A (then-amazing) resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels, or a total of about 1.3 million pixels per image.
• Built-in (not interchangeable) 3.1:1 optical zoom, or equivalent focal length (to a 35 mm film camera) of 36 mm to 110 mm.
• Macro setting, allowing one to focus as close as 30 cm (from the plane of the image sensor): an object about 6 cm wide fills the width of the image at maximum close-up.
• Automatic focus.
• Spot and center-weighted light metering.
• Aperture-priority setting.
• Built-in electronic flash.

This photo of Cisseps fulvicollis, flying around below
the ultraviolet light, froze the motion perfectly for a
good view of the underside of the wings.

In use, the Olympus D620L worked very well for close-up photography of many live moths, including moths on the wing. Given the low-light conditions outdoors at night, the auto-focus needed the boost of a flashlight shining on the moth subject, in order to focus quickly, but that was not a problem because the flashlight was a regular tool for locating resting moths in the first place. The camera's buffer allowed about a 5-photo rapid sequence for flying subjects.

Additional SLR advantages included longer battery life, because there was no need to power a display for use as a viewfinder. The camera was light and comfortable in the hand, an important aspect when taking a hundred or more photos in the space of a couple of hours.

When not operating in macro mode, the D620L also produced very good photos of people, buildings, scenery and many other subjects, filling the need for a general-purpose "snapshot" camera extremely well, without the hassle and expense of film.

The rich color of a field of straw, freshly cut and baled, in the
late day sun, makes for a pleasing shot of the rural landscape.

Nevertheless, there were some continuing challenges of color temperature, with too-blue images a persistent problem when working under the ultraviolet lights used to attract moths. The relatively low capacity SmartMedia cards of the D620L meant frequent pauses to change "electronic film" — newer cameras were using higher-capacity CompactFlash cards.

The continuing growth of the moth photography hobby was also pushing us towards a camera upgrade. Getting a recognizable photo of a moth that measured about 1 cm "nose to tail" was manageable with the D620L, but the number of pixels comprising the actual moth image was insufficient to give the fine detail often required for species identification. And many moths are smaller than this — time to go camera-shopping for a higher-resolution solution that still met our original three "must-have" criteria!

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