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Digital
cameras, and their compatible lenses are often expensive. But with quality
equipment, some fundamental photographical techniques, and the digital basics for post-processing
your pictures you will be able to produce astonishing photos in little time. The
cost of ownership will not increase as with film loaded SLR's (anyone still using them?), saving you a lot
of money in the long run.
Canon Digital SLR Cameras
You can start with the cheaper models the so called Rebel or 500D. They can be bought for little money used or affordably so new.
But for the photo buff, but not yet professional I suggest taking one more step. With Canon 50D I could for the first time make use of my 1.4x Extender. The sharpness directly from the camera had been increased (can also be manually adjusted) and was just a better camera than any of the earlier xxD. But I was longing for the in camera HD video recording and the option to select more focusing points
Canon EOS 7D is my new choice because of the new AF options that are perfect for flying birds, sports etc. It retains the 1.6x crop factor it also boost HD video capture, has a new flash support, weather sealing and much more. It is jamed packed with small new features that indeed makes it a super upgrade to 50D.
You can also pay a heck a lot of money for the MarkIII series cameras. But starting with the 50D and hopefully 7D I see no reason for the hobbyist to spend that extra money. Instead save that for the telephoto lens. you will need it!
Canon verses Nikon:
I chose to review Canon since it is the most common brand among birdphotographers. But today there seems to be very little difference between the brands, and either one is a good buy.
Note that Nikon's houses might be just as affordable as Canon's, but their lenses are more expensive, especially as you go up into the 500mm and up.
Crop factor:
The image sensor can be full frame,
or smaller than the regular 35mm film plane. If it's smaller it will increase
the focal length of any lens that you attach. Thus the focal length multiplier or "crop
factor" of the different cameras differ. Canon EOS 50D have a focal length
multiplier of 1.6x the original lens, which will increase the focal length of
a 300mm telephoto lens into a 480mm super telephoto lens. Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III has a full frame sensor and Canon EOS-1D Mark III have a factor 1.3x.
In birdphotography focal length is gold worth. A 600mm or 800mm will cost an arm and a leg. But you can easily steal a few mm by chosing a 1.6x crop factor camera.
Image Sensor:
If you change lenses often there is a high likelihood that dust will start sticking to the image sensor. This will ofcourse affect the pictures you take, and you should check the amount of dust by taking a photo of a white wall, or a clear sky.
You
should learn how to clean the CCD/CMOS yourself. This problem isn't such a conundrum as you might think at first. Just as you need to clean your telephoto lenses once in a while, the covered image sensor needs its cleaning. Note that the latest cameras come with self cleaning sensors. But the word is that you still now and then need to clean it manually.
My suggestion is to simply buy a set of 12 Sensor Swabs (size 1, 2, or 3 depending on your camera model), and a bottle of Eclipse glass cleaning liquid. Check out Photographic Solutions, Inc. website for retailers.
Note that with my Canon EOS 7D I no longer have felt the need to clean the sensor as it has a good preventive system in place. May I need it in the future, but right now I have not seen any disturbing spots on the sensor.
Memory Cards:
To find out what memory card
works the fastest with your camera check out Rob
Galbraith's CF Database.
Portable Hard Drives:
Today the small Netbooks together with a small external HD like Western Digital Passport makes a perfect match.
In the past (still a demand for it) there was a number of small harddrives with little screens and card readers built in. I still have one called the Wolverine ESP with a horrible screen, but nice and small with 80GB of storage (wolverinedata.com). Though they still are the smallest option, a Netbook offer so much more to the travelling birder.
Autofocus:
Fast
autofocus is also a great advantage in many situations. In fact Canon's very reliable,
and fast autofocus was one of the reasons that initally made this brand the most popular one among
bird photographers.
Note that selecting all available focusing points
can make the camera simply focus on something else. In
bushes, or at sea you might want to select only the center focusing point, a selected
few, or switch to manual (all depending on what camera you have, and the particular
circumstance).
I use, just about always, the center focusing point. But in 7D I often use on flying birds the center point with adjacent focusing points (like a smaller center AF system instead of a spot focused system).
Exposure control, and use of flash:
Spot metering has been very popular in bird photography because the bird usually takes up a very small part of the entire film plane. But it is difficult to use it on flying birds. It is more common that people us Evaluative Metering and adjust the white balance to get it right. You can also in most situations use a gray card or try it out with Manual Exposure. I have also used Program to test under difficult light situations and have often been quite surprised by the results (it often light up shadows very well).
You often need a flash to fill in some light. This is especially true for dark plumaged birds, uneven ligthtning, or when the light isn't enough to bring out the colors of the bird.
Note that full strength flash can reflect details of birds feathers which will cause un-natural glossy images where the bird look overly illuminated. You should instead use it as a fill (note that you most often need a tripod to accomodate the slow flash sync and dial down the flash to avoid over exposure). You can use the Better Beamer to reach far away birds or simply to save battery. Some of the best guides to the art of flash photography can be found on Luminous-landscape's
Tutorials.
You can also increase ISO settings from 400 to 1600 ISO,
but using a flash is often better since high ISO can produce noisy/grainy pictures. Note that high ISO settings can produce very good pictures up to 400 ISO, and sometimes quite usable pictures up to 800-1600 ISO. Rule of thumb: A sharp grainy picture is better than a fuzzy low ISO picture.
You
can recover many badly exposed photos in Photoshop, but you need to take the picture
as good as possible not to lose too much in quality!
Image editing:
Most DSLR pictures need improvements such as sharpening, color, contrast, or light
adjustments. It is very important to learn digital basics to post-process your
images. You can learn a lot about digital basics such as editing your images in
Photoshop, and how to set up a digital workflow to minimize the time spent post-processing
the images from Luminous-landscape's
Tutorials. You can read more of what a digital workflow can look like at The
digital picture: Digital Workflow. There is also an all in one purchase of
such a digital basics tutorial from "Birds as art" founder Arthur Morris Digital
Basics (a pdf file for $20).
Thom
Hogan's Sharpening 101 page is also a great short reading on the importance
of sharpening correctly, and Ed
Rotberg's Sharpening Tutorial is an excellent guide on how to get the best
pictures out of your digital photos.
Most tutorials use Adobe Photoshop
CS for their image editing, but you can accomplish great results with the much cheaper Adobe Photoshop
Elements 3.0 (and later) which comes with 16 bit, RAW image support for less than $100. The drawback being fewer tools that actually support 16 bit, and some tools that are only found in CS.
If you want to take the highest quality pictures your camera can muster you should always use uncompressed
format - RAW instead of compressed jpeg that holds much less
information, and where image editing produce only small enhancements.
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My Workflow:
- The very first thing if I have time is to review the pictures on the LCD at the back of the camera, deleting as many as I can easily determine to be not sharp or otherwise bad.
- After downloading the RAW images to the computer using a Sandisk reader (USB), I begin by viewing/erasing bad pictures
in Adobe Photoshop CS4 Bridge. (comparable to Adobe Elements 7.0 Organizer).
- I open the good pictures in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (or you could use Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0), and adjust only the exposure with the histogram as the guide. I open them as 16 bit files
- I crop and resize. Note that you can easily create some dynamics in the picture by not cropping to close, leaving some space in front of where the bird is leaning. Same thing in the vertical cropping. A flying bird looks best if it has more air underneath than above. But note that the complete opposite can sometimes give unexpected effects and be just as good!
- If I were to use the noice reduction filter it would be now. It is great for creating super smooth backgrounds
- I adjust ligthening, and sharpening also when in basic Photoshop Elements mode.
- The quick and dirty sharpening technique often used to speed up web postings is done by selecting the parts I want sharp with the Lasso Tool, and then selecting sharpening edges (CS4 only), Sharpen, or Unsharp Mask.
- I try to keep the images 1000 pixels wide to avoid tiny pictures in high resolution screens (like in all laptops, notebooks and even netbooks).
- Finally I convert the pictures to 8 bit files, and save them for the web with 65-75% quality (file size is about 100-200 KB for 1000px wide).
- Since RAW images take a lot of space I move out last years images to a 1TB external storage.
Prime Lenses:
To get the
best pictures you need a fixed super tele (prime lens), and if used hand-held
with image-stabilization (e.g., Nikon 400mm VR, or Canon 400mm IS),
and a shoulder stock with remote release (e.g., BushHawk).
The best prime lenses out
there is the Canon 500mm (most common) or the 600mm f/4 L IS USM. You will get excellent reach, and image stabilization. The 500mm is somewhat easier to carry around (less bulky, and three and a half punds lighter, but still a very heavy lens), but the 600mm will give you better reach. There is also an 800mm that is really nice in the hand and the pictures I have seen are really good. But I haven't seen that many pictures with it to argue that it is the best super telephoto lens out there.
The 400mm f/2.8 L IS USM is very heavy and expensive, but extremely sharp. Canon 400mm f/5.6 L USM is very good hand held, produce excellent quality, but it
lacks IS which makes it less popular today since IS has become standard on most
other telephoto lenses. The 400mm f/4.0 DO IS USM has been burdened with a few optical shortcomings, and is very expensive. I have seen quite a few, very disappointing pictures taken by the very best naturephotographers. It is a very tempting lens due to the low weight, but you need to test it out before the return policy expires so that you don't end up with a lemon.
Canon 300mm lenses are often usable to get "birds in their environment" pictures, but need teleconverters for most portraits (see Teleconverter section below).
Zoom Lenses:
The most popular hand
held lens today in USA is the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM which is preferred
because of its versatility, relative low weight, and image-stabilization. Sharpness at 400mm doesn't seem to be as good as with primes.
Another very nice zoom range is the 70-200mm L IS USM f/4.0, but you would need another telephoto lens to complement that one.
Teleconverters:
Teleconverters can loose a little light (one stop
in aperture), and don't always produce as sharp pictures. Note that excellent
pictures can be produced with teleconverters, but quality lens combinations are
a must.
The teleconverters are a great choice for creating super telephoto
lenses without spending huge amount of money on a fixed lens, and to get the reach that
you otherwise cannot get. The combinations are often much less heavy than the
fixed lens counterpart.
One excellent lens combination is the Canon
300mm f/2.8 L IS USM + Canon Extender II 1.4x. One very popular alternative is the Canon 300mm f/4 L IS USM + Canon Extender II 1.4x which is much cheaper, and very light weight, but it needs a great camera to counterweigh the loss of sharpness and contrast (miniumum a 50D). Note that most Canon telephoto lenses produce great pictures with the 1.4x Extender.
My Suggestion (December 2009):
For the budget minded consumer looking to buy his or her introduction DSLR setup I suggest buying
Canon EOS 7D . Note however that you can get perfectly good images from a Canon EOS 50D back to the 20D model if you would stumble upon one for little money (or need a cheap backup camera, note however that the battery in 7D is different from these earlier models).
There are three competing lenses discussed below. Regardless of what you decide to buy consider buying a shoulderstock with remote release if used hand held.
Canon 300mm f/4 L IS USM is light weight, has image stabilization, and you can make it into a 420mm by coupling it with a Canon Extender II 1.4x without loosing autofocus. This combination looks to be sharper than the Zoom.
Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM is great for its zoom versatility, light weight, and image stabilization. I have seen great pictures with this lens, but more often they are not up to par in sharpness.
Canon 400mm f/5.6 L USM was my choice based on the razor sharp images it does take in good light, but I often curse the fact I don't have image stabilization. A Bushhawk shoulderstock helped me a lot in allowing very sharp hand held shots when seabirding.
The three lenses go for around $1000 each so I suggest you compare pictures taken by all camera/lenses (see sample configurations below), and consider its primary use.
I used the 400mm for quite some time and was very happy with this fast AF lens. It has also very nice handling and feel very light. But I ran into many situations where I needed a tripod to get images of wood warblers and other birds under dim lightning. This made me switch to the 300mm+1.4x combo. It doesn't deliver as crisp images as the prime lens. But it is great to have it as a walkaround lens with IS, and use it as a 300mm to take images of mammals or use it as a macro for insects and "weeds". I haven't tried the 100-400mm because I have seen too many bad images or pictures that are just not crisp enough for me.
Great DSLR/SLR, and lenses links:
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