One of the benefits of my job is that I get to travel to interesting places. Over the years, I have taken all of my SLR camera gear with me, which has been a challenge at time. This became more apparent over the last couple of trips, so I decided that it was time to invest in a travel camera.

After doing quite a bit of research, I decided on the Sony DSC-RX10 III. As you might expect, its at the high end of the point and shoot range, offering a lot of zoom, and a big image sensor. It's not quite an SLR, but it has many of the same capabilities and features.

My goal was to have a smaller, single lens camera to be able to put in my bag, and take with me on trips where taking all my regular camera gear just isn't practical. We'll see how it works. So for the first test, we spent a few hours down at Reifel, taking pictures of birds. This was a good test, and overall the camera performed pretty well.

We had a good day, and saw some cool things - eagles, peregrine falcon, great horned owl and the usual collection of ducks and small birds. We even saw a garter snake, which was a first for me.

Over all the camera did about as well as I could expect. The images aren't as clean or as sharp, and the autofocus has trouble with fast moving small birds. The focus isn't as sharp either, which leads to some photos not having the part of the bird I want in focus. I'm sure it will get better as I get familiar with the gear, and I'd never use this camera over my big camera for this type of photography anyway. But for those trips, it will be awesome to have something smaller and easier to carry. We'll give it a real test in Dubai.

Anyway, here are the pics.