The Nethie Boys

[Little Bay Poo]

Bo B Bunny wrote:

WOW! Now that I read your saying he's a blue otter - I see that LOL!

I want to be sure when I get a chance to get a nethie - I think I want either a smoke pearl (sable or marten - I think either is just beautiful) or a maybe an otter but I really love the smoke pearls.

Yeah, my camera does funny things with the lighting indoors and makes Ronnie's fur look a lot darker than it actually is. The outdoor pictures are pretty accurate representations of each rabbit's color.

After Billy, James' Smoky, and pictures of smoke pearls that I've seen online, I think this is my favorite color too! Although I keep seeing such cute blue Nethies (especially the young blue buck from polly's blog) that I just can't decide!

 

[Little Bay Poo]

Jess_sully wrote:

I completely understand. I just got a little excited when I saw that you -might- have a bonded pair of bucks! I don't blame you for not trying to bond them so far, I'm sure they're doing fine as it is now, too. Do you have any other pets that they seem interested in? Cats or whatnot? Sorry, you might have already posted this somewhere...

No, I never posted about this anywhere...and you don't have to apologize for asking questions, even if I have covered them before

Chris is allergic to dogs, cats, birds, and probably other animals too. Amazingly he's not allergic to rabbits, so in terms of pets we just have Billy and Ronnie. Billy is a people bunny. He LOVES attention from humans...and he also likes to climb on them. If people aren't watching him play, he gets sad and goes back to his cage! As a people bunny I don't think Billy likes interacting with other animals so much. (This is just a guess, I could be totally wrong since we've only seen him with Ronnie).

Ronnie, on the other hand, would probably do really well with a female bunny. I can see Ronnie being the type who would easily bond with most animals but we don't have the space for a third bunny at the moment . Makes me a little sad because Ronnie looks so lonely sometimes!

 

[Little Bay Poo]

Billy was born on February 28, 2007. He is a smoke pearl marten Netherland Dwarf. Here are some pictures of him taken on 3/3/08. (More to come in a later post...I have about 20 or so that I want to put up and I don't want to make a giant blob of pictures ).

 

[Little Bay Poo]

When I look through bunny blogs, I always wonder what camera other people are using. In case anyone else wonders the same thing, here is a bit about my camera. Warning: I know nothing about photography so I may describe some things inaccurately

I use the Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 digital camera. It's slightly larger than a deck of cards. This camera cost somewhere between $200 and $300 and I consider it a very low-end camera. It works well for me because I only use it to shoot home movies and take basic photos, so I'm not looking for anything high-end here. (Although I was really jealous when I saw the beautiful pictures of Pet_Bunny's Pebbles! )

The thing that is really crucial when I take photos of my bunnies is speed. If you've ever owned a Netherland Dwarf you will know that they NEVER STOP MOVING. I have to use the ISO setting on my camera to get a picture without blur. Unfortunately, the ISO setting on this camera has a lot of "noise" at the higher levels, such as ISO 1000. This means the picture turns out very grainy, like the one below:

I'm still learning how to use the camera to find a setting that will take a good indoor picture. My camera works really well with a lot of natural light. I can take pictures on the ISO setting outdoors and have them come out really nicely. Here are some more pictures taken this month of Billy outside:

 

[Little Bay Poo]

PHEW! Picture overload. Well, after this batch I will be up to date on the bunny pictures I want to post, so updates will come less frequently. Since it's raining today, I'm gonna try and see if I can figure out how to get a good indoor picture with my camera. Until then, here are the rest of the Billy pictures from 3/3/08. Enjoy! :biggrin2::biggrin2:


My current desktop background:

Make sure you get my good side…

Wait, no! It's this side…

MY wooden house!

A ball of fluff

Bye for now!

 

[Tracey]

You KNOW I had to subscribe to this thread! These two are my fave bunnies on here (other than my own of course).

 

[Little Bay Poo]

Tracey wrote:

You KNOW I had to subscribe to this thread! These two are my fave bunnies on here (other than my own of course).

LOL, Thanks Tracey! :biggrin2:

 

[Little Bay Poo]

WOW...I'm so glad I finally took the time to read an online manual for my digital camera. It has made a HUGE difference in the quality of pictures that I am able to take! :biggrin2: Over the past few days I have gotten so many pictures of Billy and Ronnie, that I don't know what to do with them all! It's about time because I was actually pretty guilty of not taking enough pictures of these boys. While I had a lot of video, I hardly had any pictures because I was having so much trouble with red eye and color skewing.

So, my plan is to post only a few pictures every time I update the blog, because it seems that I have already squashed a huge amount of old pictures into the first page! The next post will be about my camera in case anybody likes the pictures and wants to know what settings I have been using. I'm not trying to give photography advice, because I honestly know nothing on the subject! But I thought if some beginners out there want to copy my newbie method, I'll put it out there for ya!

Ok, off to find a few pictures and to figure out how to explain my camera

 

[Little Bay Poo]

First, let me say that my intention is not to sound preachy or know-it-all, and I hope that's not the way this turns out. Sometimes when I write things they end up sounding ways they are not supposed to...so I apologize if this is one of those times!

Secondly, if you just want to see bunny pictures scroll down and don't read any further. Only read what I have written below if you like the photos and want to know how I was able to get them as a beginner with a beginner's camera. Ok, here we go...

The camera I use is called the Sony Cybershot (DSC-W50 model). I got it in December 2006 and it's my first digital camera (yeah I'm a bit slow on the whole getting into new technology thing ). It's one of those ultra compact digital cameras, so I'm guessing the picture quality is slightly worse than a full sized camera. It was pretty cheap, a couple hundred bucks, so that means it's low-end right? I dunno...I warned you I know nothing about cameras .

I was having the same problem in all of the previous pictures I had taken, and that was FLASH. Well, being stubborn and not wanting to read the manual or look at the helpful icons on my camera, it took me over a year to figure out how to turn flash off. I know...that's pretty bad .

Billy is a smoke pearl marten and probably has some REW in his lines, which gives a ruby glow to his eye. This made the pictures with flash unbearable...my adorable little Billy turned into Satan Bunny. Ronnie doesn't have that ruby glow so his pictures didn't turn out nearly as bad, but I still wasn't happy with them.

So first step for my new pictures was to TURN FLASH OFF. This is crucial...I don't care if it takes longer to focus and you get more blurry pictures this way. The ones that do come out make it worth having to trash the blurry ones. The key here (at least for my camera) is to have A LOT of natural light. I open up all the blinds to let as much light in as possible, and turn on all the incandescent lights for good measure . I keep my camera on the auto setting because it seems to work the best.

Here are a couple of shots that I got with this method:

I really like taking close-ups because I think it brings out Billy and Ronnie's expressions and cuteness. To get close-ups, I turned on the macro function, which is a little flower icon on my camera. With this setting on, my camera lets me focus on things as close as 2 centimeters. Here are a couple of shots with the macro button on:

Well, that's it for now. I have a lot more pictures to post but I'm going to hold off on those because I don't want to put too many pictures up all at once. I hope you enjoyed the new pictures of Billy and Ronnie!

 

[Little Bay Poo]

Sorry, I forgot to add that I also use the "burst shot" mode when taking pictures without flash, which takes 3 pictures in 1 second if you hold down the button. I found this mode to be really important because often the first shot will not focus correctly, and only the second or third shot will be usable.

 

[Bo B Bunny]

OMG! look at those little mouths! *smooch, smooch, smooch, smooch!* They are too cute!

Great info on the camera. I need a new one. That one looks like a decent one! I don't need anything extravagant and it would do just fine I bet!

I'm horrible at reading manuals also. This should take you to the next page of your blog so you could add some more photos now...... :biggrin2:

 

[tonyshuman]

I saw Ronnie on cuteoverload.com yesterday!! That is a hard blog to get on, so grats on an officially super-cute bunny!!

 

[Little Bay Poo]

tonyshuman wrote:

I saw Ronnie on cuteoverload.com yesterday!! That is a hard blog to get on, so grats on an officially super-cute bunny!!

OH MY GOD! I was wondering why that one flickr photo had over 1000 views when the others had 100. That's really funny, because I have never sent a photo in to cuteoverload...I guess someone else sent it for me. Either way it must mean that Ronnie is a really handsome bunny! :biggrin2:

And Bo, about the camera ~
I think it's a really good one for the price, I've gotten a lot out of it. I use it for all my bunny videos and these new pictures are coming out well within my approval rating for a person who just wants a nice photo to remember her bunnies by!

 

[osprey]

Thanks for the tips about bunny photography. I have become the defacto photographer for our rescue so I take lots and lots and lots of pictures of bunnies. Most of the pictures here were taken by me and my kids http://therabbithaven.org/adoption_showcase.htm. I have never tried the burst mode thing, I'll definitely try that out myself. I totally agree that you have to take many shots before you get a good one. I usually take 10-15 shots of a bunny for these posed pictures, and keep one of them. I always try to shoot without flash, the red/yellow eye thing for bunnies is horrible and the tools that I use do not fix them very well.

An experience photographer gave me a tip that I have yet to try. If you need to use a flash because the ambient light is just too low, you can tape a piece of tissue paper over the flash. This helps scatter the light and make the red eye less severe. I also use the google Picasa 2 program to do some post edits on my photos. It is pretty good at fixing up colors and fixing images that are too dim or too bright.

I use a Nikon Coolpix camera, and don't feel bad, it took me 6 months before I broke down and read the manual to figure out what the little flower and lightning bolt icons meant

 

[tundrakatiebean]

I can't believe I missed this thread! Your boys are sooo cute!

As for the ISO question I can help you out. Basically the higher the ISO the higher the grain (this goes for film too) the lowest ISO settings are usually 50-100 and are good for really sunny outdoor conditions. 400-800 ISO is good for indoor light. I usually just hang out in the 400 range.

As for the red eye flash problem, I use some masking tape over my flash and it lowers the amount of red-eye for my bunnies, not sure how well it would work for you

 

[Little Bay Poo]

Thanks osprey and tundrakatiebean for the tips on the tissue paper / masking tape over the flash. I never heard of this before, but will definitely have to try it out sometime (when I get off my lazy butt and get some masking tape ). It should be really helpful because as it gets later in the day I find it really difficult to take pictures since all the outside light is gone. As a result it starts to take up to 3 seconds to focus before the camera actually takes a picture. I'm sure having the flash on would greatly reduce the focus time.

As for the ISO settings, I think my camera just stinks in this department. I've tried setting various ISO's and the lower ones like 200 and 400 still come out blurry because they don't take the picture fast enough. The only settings that do take the picture fast enough are 800 and 1000, and at that high of an ISO the quality really suffers.

Hopefully I'll update the blog with a few more pictures tonight, depending on how tired I am when I get out of the shower. Bah, who am I kidding...I'm a night owl I'll most definitely update in about an hour!

 

[osprey]

You might be able to mitigate the delay somewhat. On my camera, if you depress the shutter button part of the way, you engage the auto focus but do not snap the picture. As long as you hold the button in that position, it stays focused on the spot that you chose. Now, when you want to shoot, there is almost no delay at all. I'll bet your camera has a similar feature.

 

[Little Bay Poo]

osprey wrote:

You might be able to mitigate the delay somewhat. On my camera, if you depress the shutter button part of the way, you engage the auto focus but do not snap the picture. As long as you hold the button in that position, it stays focused on the spot that you chose. Now, when you want to shoot, there is almost no delay at all. I'll bet your camera has a similar feature.

Ah, yeah! I have to get better about controlling the pressure I put on the button though because I have a tendency to slip up and accidentally take the photo before I intended to

To be honest, I actually wasn't sure what my camera was doing when I only held the button part way but now that you mention it, it does focus like that on all settings. I was fiddling around with the 16 pictures per second (multi-burst) mode today, and was holding the shutter button half-way in anticipation of capturing a Billy binky, but my fingers were too clumsy and my brain was too slow to react LOL. It's too bad because Billy was doing some really awesome binky dances for me today

 

[Little Bay Poo]

P I N E C O N E S


Ronnie disapproves of pinecones...

I'm just kidding...HE LOVES THEM! And so does Billy.

After finding the old thread about baking pinecones at 200 degrees for 15 minutes to kill off harmful stuff and make them safe for bunnies, I decided to find some pinecones. Luckily, there's still some forest around here, so it's only a short walk to get to pine trees. The first group of trees is very young and hanging slightly over the steel barriers that prevent cars from driving off the road. I don't like to collect them here (especially when there's a lot of traffic) because there was an incident a few years back where a jogger got pinned between the barrier and a car that drove off the road. She was ok, but I think she had to have her leg amputated

I decided to take a walk with Chris to find an alternate supply of pinecones. After walking on a dirt path through the woods for a quarter mile, I finally saw a clearing with pine trees. As we approached the trees, I saw a man with two large dogs (not on leashes), and the dogs were running toward me. I thought to myself "Thank God I'm not afraid of dogs!"

Well these guys were jumping all over me and ignoring Chris (which is good because he's allergic to dogs). Anyhow, I just thought it was strange to see such big doggies bounding toward me and wondered what their owner would have done had I been afraid of them. Oh well, onto bunny pictures!

As you can see by the amount of pictures, Billy likes pinecones much more than Ronnie

Chew chew chew...

::GASP::

"HEY! What's the big idea?!?!" :X

This is Billy's mad face for taking his picture. Or maybe he's just confused

 

[Little Bay Poo]

The sequence of three pics with the blurry one in the middle was taken as a 3 picture per second set. I would have deleted the blurry one except for the fact that it shows the progression from happily chewing to being really upset that his picture was taken! The only trouble is, Billy has a hard time pulling off a mad face because he's so cute all the time