Me, Myself, and Birding

I have enjoyed birdwatching, and photography for more than twenty years on two continents often combining the two interests into the art of bird photography. I created this site to aid in bird identification, and to share information on this great hobby.

My photo gear today (November 2009):
Canon EOS 7D, Canon 500mm f/4.0 L IS USM, Canon Extender 1.4x II. I also have a 300mm f/4.0 L IS USM that is great for insect macro. I do miss my 400mm f/5.6 L USM that I sold to buy the 300mm. For family and fun I use the price worthy kit lens, Canon EFS 17-85mm. Note however that it isn't so great at wide angle because of the very noticable light fall-off showing as dark corners on the lighter areas of the image.

I have a Canon 580EX II flash though I prefer to use morning and evening light in my photos. But try to live without a flash in the jungle, a dark forest, or in the dark November rain :-)

Sound recordings are with the Røde VideoMic, Dead Cat Wind Muff, Olympus VN-4100PC or directly into the 7D.

I primarily use a Sandisk 32GB Extreme (60 MB/s, UDMA) Compact Flash card. Backup cards are two 8GB Sandisk Extreme III and two 2GB Sandisk Extreme III.

For support I use a BushHawk shoulder stock with remote release. A Benro C-257 tripod with a Manfrotto 701RC2 Fluid Video Head. I also have a Velbon CF-7 monopod.

I use a Wolverine ESP 80GB to offload the cards when in the field. I always carry a backup battery. Lens cloth, Lens paper and lens cleaning solution is also in the bag.

To transport my gear I use an aircraft carry on luggage on wheels. It's inside is clad with an old insulating ground sheet. I add extra protection during flights etc by stuffing it with socks a pair of trousers etc :-)

At home I use a laptop computer with Windows Vista (soon upgrading to Windows 7). I use a SanDisk USB reader to import the pictures and I prefix and sort them with the date of capture using adobe Bridge which is included in Adobe Photoshop CS4. I have maximized the icons in Windows Explorer so that I can easily spot bad ones that I can delete or find good ones to open in Bridge. I use Bridge for final inspection and try to delete as much as I dare. I also use it to open the best ones in PS CS4 for editing. Annually I export all pictures from previous year to a 1TB external Western Digital HD.

My birding gear today (October 2009):
I have had many binoculars in my day. But I still love my old Leitz Trinovid 8x40 B and have no other. But if I wasn't concerned of the weight I would definitely buy the ZEISS Victory 10x42 T* FL. I am still contemplating the Zeiss for special occasions and a Leica Trinovid 8x20 for daily use. I am thinking of buying a Kowa scope and 20-60x zoom eye piece.

The website:
The site is designed for IE, and Firefox/Netscape on a Windows OS. The design had influences from many sites though just about every site in 2003 seemed to have the grey theme. But I also used a lot of input from my past work site which had the same image setup and menu to the right. It is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, and 32 bit color quality. But it does also work well on Safari and on a Mac OS

It was hand coded in html, and makes extensive use of CSS. I also use an html editor to speed up editing, checking links, and for making sweeping changes across all pages before the annual re-publishing of the entire site.

I have used four different hosting services. This is mainly because they have gone down in price. I now use One.com (12 SEK/month).

Best Regards,
Martin Lofgren

Skanör,
Sweden

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."