There is no doubt that the move to digital has revolutionized bird photography in the last few years and, however much you may hear claims to the contrary, film is pretty much dead, in this field at least. Instant feedback, an unlimited supply of digital ‘film’, usable high ISO and no more airport X-rays are just some of the joys of digital capture. It is easy to get carried away with the advantages of digital over film, but it is not all one-way traffic and there are a couple of areas where film had an advantage.
The first is in the capture itself, as due to the way that digital capture works, only a very small proportion of the data that is recorded is from the dark shadow areas of the image, so in this respect digital can compare unfavourably with film. The other big disadvantage of digital compared with film is that when you part with your hard-earned cash for the latest digital camera body, you are effectively buying all the digital ‘film’ for the entire life of the camera. This means that the camera body now has a much more important role in producing high-quality images than when using a film camera. Before digital came along the most important elements of a high-quality image were the lens and the film. I could produce the same quality of image from a pro spec SLR as I could from a bottom of the range SLR from the same manufacturer by using the same lens and film with each body. There were lots of advantages to the pro spec camera, such as durability and faster shutter speed, but you couldn’t tell which camera body had been used when viewing the slides. Not so with digital. In general, the more money you spend, the more megapixels you get and the better the quality of your final image.
One side effect of having the ‘film’ locked into the camera body is that as this relatively young technology develops, each new camera that hits the market is probably cheaper and produces higher resolution images than your current model. In order to compete in the quality stakes you have to buy a new camera relatively often (and of course your old one will have depreciated massively in the meantime). Good for the manufacturers, not for the photographer. In the days of film, when a higher-quality film was introduced no investment in new equipment was required. Having pointed out the disadvantages, I must say that like many others who rather begrudgingly moved to digital a few years ago, I could never go back to film.
Digital capture enables you to record the image in one of two formats – jpeg or RAW. Jpeg has the advantage of producing smaller files, and the pictures can be downloaded and used straightaway, without being processed first on a computer. If you are serious about your photography, though, you will probably shoot in the RAW format. This means processing every image you want to keep on the computer, but you do have a great deal of control over the final result and will be able to create your final image in the tiff format, which most photo libraries and publishers require. On many cameras you can record both a RAW and a jpeg image at the same time, but personally I have found little use for this and it takes up more precious memory space.
Digital has definitely made the craft of bird photography easier, and has been viewed with suspicion in some quarters because of this. Both flight and action photography are areas that have been most significantly affected by the demise of film, as photographers will often take hundreds, if not thousands, of shots in the hope of getting something good. In the days of film, the cost of so many rolls of film would be a limiting factor for many people, but of course with digital this is not an issue.
Exposure is another key area – I was often surprised to find that even extremely experienced photographers seemed to struggle with this under tricky circumstances. Because of the instant feedback available with histograms, getting the exposure right is now easy, even in the most challenging of conditions. But however easy the craft of photography has become, the art of photography remains firmly in the photographer’s hands. Getting all that technical stuff right is one thing, but in the final analysis what makes a good picture is what you point your camera at – that is the art.
HARDWARE
CAMERA EQUIPMENT
Although it is possible (with luck) to take good bird photographs using a compact camera, generally a large telephoto lens is a must for most bird photography, and a single-lens reflex camera (SLR) is the ideal tool for the job. These cameras, with their array of settings and interchangeable lens system, provide the creative flexibility to enable you to do the job under all conditions, and it is SLR cameras that I discuss here.
BUYING NEW TECHNOLOGY
BEFORE WE START TO LOOK AT WHAT CAMERA AND COMPUTER EQUIPMENT YOU NEED, BEAR IN MIND ONE OVERRIDING PRINCIPLE THAT YOU SHOULD ALWAYS APPLY: DO NOT BUY THE LATEST THING AS SOON AS IT BECOMES AVAILABLE. SUCH TECHNOLOGY IS OFTEN REFERRED TO AS ‘LEADING EDGE’, BUT TO PEOPLE THAT WORK IN THE IT INDUSTRY, AS I ONCE DID, IT IS KNOWN AS ‘BLEEDING EDGE’, AS IT IS OFTEN VERY FRAGILE. THIS IS PARTICULARLY TRUE OF COMPUTER EQUIPMENT, BUT YOU SHOULD APPLY THE SAME RULE TO DIGITAL CAMERAS, AS THESE ARE EFFECTIVELY JUST COMPUTERS WITH A HOLE IN THE FRONT FOR THE LENS. COMPUTER AND CAMERA MANUFACTURERS SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF MONEY ON RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AND THERE IS ENORMOUS PRESSURE TO GET THE PRODUCT TO MARKET TO RECOUP THESE COSTS. THIS ALMOST ALWAYS RESULTS IN LESS TESTING TIME THAN IS REQUIRED TO IRON OUT THE INEVITABLE BUGS THAT ARE TO BE EXPECTED IN VERY COMPLEX TECHNOLOGICAL EQUIPMENT. THE BUGS ARE DISCOVERED, OF COURSE, BUT ONLY AFTER MANY EAGER CONSUMERS HAVE INVESTED QUITE A LOT OF MONEY IN THE SHINY NEW TECHNOLOGY AND FOUND THE BUGS FOR THEMSELVES. MY RECOMMENDATION IS TO WAIT UNTIL EVERYONE ELSE HAS FOUND THE BUGS AND THEY HAVE BEEN CORRECTED, THEN BUY. YOU MAY NOT BE THE FIRST ON YOUR STREET TO OWN THE NEW TECHNOLOGY, BUT WHEN YOU BUY IT, IT WILL WORK AND WILL PROBABLY BE SIGNIFICANTLY CHEAPER THAN WHEN IT WAS FIRST LAUNCHED.
Camera body
Having established that the digital camera body is so important in producing high-quality images, there remains the question of which make and model to choose. As far as make is concerned, there are only really two top names that have a comprehensive range of lenses and accessories. They are Canon and Nikon, and I would recommend either of them. I have used Canon equipment for many years. There is a certain amount of (mostly!) good-natured rivalry between users of Canon and Nikon equipment (brand loyalty is almost a given – once you choose one you’ll probably stick with it, largely because you will have forked out a certain amount of cash on manufacturer-specific lenses and other kit), but both manufacturers produce very high-quality equipment. With advances in digital technology, every new camera that comes out is better than the last, so the lead tends to change hands between manufacturers.
Whatever brand you decide on, remember that it’s good news that the choice is difficult – competition keeps prices down, so we all need both of the two main contenders to do well.
What model to choose is an entirely different question. With new models being released at regular intervals, it would be pointless for me to recommend a particular model because it will be out of date by the time this book is published. Instead, here are some key areas that you need to consider.
Megapixels (mp) | The more data you collect to make up an image the better. I would say that you should stick to cameras at 8mp and over. Remember, though, that the cameras with the most megapixels are very expensive. Because of the amount of data that they are processing, they also tend to be much slower than other cameras with fewer megapixels.
Magnification | Sensor size varies across the range of cameras available quite considerably, and this affects the apparent magnification of the image. Sensors that are around the same size as a 35mm film slide are known as ‘full frame’ and have a magnification factor of 1x (this means no magnification). Such sensors are currently only used in top-of-the-range cameras. Of the smaller sensors, Canon produces two alternatives at 1.3x (APS-H sensor) and 1.6x (APS-C sensor). The 1.3x is probably a good compromise and is very popular among bird photographers, as it is much cheaper than the full-frame models; although it produces around half the megapixels of those, the quality is still very good. These models also have good frame and burst rates as they don’t have as much data to process. The extra magnification is also very useful when photographing birds. Likewise the 1.6x models have even more magnification and are much smaller and lighter, although not made to the professional specification of the more expensive models. Nikons have two sensor sizes, full frame and 1.5x.
The stated magnification factors are a little misleading, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these sensors don’t actually magnify the image – the image is just smaller to start with. The easiest way to think of it is that the sensor effectively crops the full-frame image that is being produced by the lens, as the sensor is only big enough to capture part of the data. A full-frame sensor catches the maximum amount of data possible from the lens in a rectangular shape. A 1.3x sensor misses out quite a lot of the picture around the edge and a 1.6x sensor misses out even more of the picture, so you end up with just the middle bit of the original full-frame image. This gives the impression, when you view the image, of it having been magnified.
This is perhaps more easily explained with some examples. The three pictures on the right and overleaf, showing the food pass between a pair of European Bee-eaters, demonstrate the effect of using full frame, 1.3x and 1.6x bodies on the same subject with the same lens.
The other thing to note about the stated magnification factors is that they only refer to one side of the image and not the area. Thus a 1.3x magnification is 1.3x the magnification in the horizontal and 1.3x in the vertical, so in total area the magnification is 1.3 multiplied by 1.3, which is 1.69x. Apply this same principle to the 1.6x sensor and you end up with a magnification factor of 2.56x in area, or well over twice the size of the original image.
A FULL FRAME B 1.3X C 1.6X
THESE THREE IMAGES EXPLAIN WHY MANUFACTURERS USE MAGNIFICATION FACTORS TO DESCRIBE THE EFFECT OF A SMALLER SENSOR, AS THE SMALLER THE SENSOR THE BIGGER THE SUBJECT APPEARS IN THE FRAME. THE THREE IMAGES OVERLEAF, HOWEVER, SHOW HOW THE SO-CALLED MAGNIFICATION IS ACHIEVED BY EFFECTIVELY TAKING A CROP FROM THE FULL-FRAME IMAGE THAT THE CAMERA IS STILL RECEIVING FROM THE LENS.
A FULL FRAME – NO CROP
B 1.3X – THE SHADED AREA IS NOT RECORDED AS THE SENSOR IS TOO SMALL
C 1.6X – THE SHADED AREA IS NOT RECORDED AS THE SENSOR IS TOO SMALL
Shooting Rate | For action and flight photography, the more images you can make in as short a time as possible, the more chances you have of capturing that elusive moment. In the days of film, this depended largely on how fast the motor drive could move the film through the back of the camera. With digital it all depends on how fast the data can be transferred from the camera to your memory card so that the sensor can record a new image. The faster rates are usually only available in the high-end pro spec cameras, but the full-frame cameras are usually much slower than the models with smaller sensors, as they have much more data to deal with. This is the primary reason why the favourite sensor size with Canon photographers is the 1.3x, as it can currently achieve a shooting rate of 10 frames per second – but by the time you read this the latest model will probably do even better than this.
Burst Rate | Burst rate is closely related to shooting rate, but is the number of frames that can be captured by the camera before the camera stops and you can’t shoot any more until it recovers. This can be very frustrating for the bird photographer, because until the camera is ready you can’t take any more pictures, regardless of what the bird is doing in front of your viewfinder. It occurs when the area that the camera uses to store the data from the pictures has filled up and can’t hold any more. This is not the CF or SD memory card, but an internal buffer within the camera itself. As the camera writes the data from the buffer to the card, it frees up space in the buffer and you can shoot again until the buffer is once again full. In practice, you can take one or two pictures as the buffer clears, but you can’t shoot continuously until the buffer is pretty much empty.
The amount of data that is captured is key to reaching the limit of the buffer and clearly the more data captured per frame, the fewer frames it takes to fill the buffer, which is another reason why the 1.3x series of Canon cameras is popular with bird photographers. Typically, these cameras can capture twice the number of frames that a full-frame camera can before the buffer fills up. At the moment this is up to 30 RAW frames, but no doubt the capacity will increase significantly over the coming years. You can make the most of your camera’s performance by always using the fastest cards in your camera. The faster the card the quicker it can be written to, with the result that the buffer will be cleared more quickly, enabling you to shoot again. The difference between a slow (cheap) card and the fastest cards available is significant, the fastest enabling a full buffer to be cleared in under 20 seconds, the slowest requiring minutes. Eventually the camera manufacturers will come up with what we really want – a 20-megapixel-plus camera that shoots at 10 frames a second and is able to shoot 100 or so frames continuously without stopping.
Lenses
Although there are exceptions, you will usually need a long lens to get a good-sized image of a bird, but which lens? The standard lens for the bird photographer seems to have currently settled on the 500mm f4 specification. I use this often, both on its own and with a 1.4x converter. Although I have hand-held it occasionally, it is too heavy for regular use in this way and I nearly always use it on a tripod with a Wimberley head (see tripods and heads). A maximum aperture of f4 is important, as this gives a maximum aperture of f5.6 when the 1.4x converter is attached. The value of f5.6 is very significant, because many camera bodies will not autofocus below this. The pro bodies will autofocus down to f8, but at this aperture I find that the autofocus system works too slowly for anything other than the slowest of moving targets.
In addition to the 500mm lens, many professional bird photographers have a 300mm f2.8, which is light and fast enough to be hand-held for long periods. Although I have owned a 300mm f2.8 in the past, I prefer Canon’s 400mm f4 DO lens, which is amazingly small and light and weighs around half as much as the 500mm f4. The early versions of the 400mm lens had some problems and were apparently not sharp, but this was resolved in later versions and certainly the one I own is a very good lens indeed. Using this lens fitted with a 1.4x converter and on a 1.3x body, I am effectively hand-holding a 35mm equivalent of a 728mm telephoto lens, which is very useful for flight and action work. I am so impressed with this combination that I often find myself using my light 400mm lens instead of the 500mm.
A LONG LENS SUCH AS A 500MM IS PRETTY MUCH ESSENTIAL FOR BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY IN ORDER TO PRODUCE A REASONABLE SIZE IMAGE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE PHOTOGRAPHING SMALL BIRDS LIKE THIS LONG-TAILED TIT (AEGITHALOS CAUDATUS).
WHEN PHOTOGRAPHING VERY FAST-FLYING BIRDS LIKE THIS COMMON SWIFT (APUS APUS), I FIND THAT HAND-HOLDING GIVES ME FAR MORE FLEXIBILITY AND SPEED OF MOVEMENT THAN ANY TRIPOD HEAD. THE 500MM F4 IS TOO HEAVY TO HOLD FOR LONG PERIODS SO I USE MY 400MM F4 DO LENS WITH A 1.4X CONVERTER, WHICH IS MUCH LIGHTER.
A WIDE-ANGLE ZOOM SUCH AS THE 24–105MM CANON LENS I USED FOR THIS IMAGE IS VERY USEFUL FOR CAPTURING WHOLE COLONIES OF BIRDS SUCH AS THESE EMPEROR PENGUINS (APTENODYTES FORSTERI) AT SNOW HILL ISLAND IN ANTARCTICA.
Many photographers also carry a telephoto zoom, and the Canon 100–400mm lens is a popular choice. In places like Antarctica I do the majority of work with this lens because it is so light that I can carry it around all day, and I rarely need a tripod. Nikon makes a 200–400mm zoom, which is of a very high quality and one stop faster at f4, but it is a lot heavier. A standard zoom of somewhere between 24 and 100mm is also useful for general pictures.
Teleconverters are very useful and I would never be without my Canon 1.4x converter, which I use frequently with my big telephotos. A 1.4x teleconverter magnifies an image 1.4x along the horizontal, but (as is the case with the magnification of the digital camera bodies) the area is 1.4 square, so the overall area magnification is a fraction short of 2x. This is extremely useful when photographing birds, as it means that you can get that extra magnification with almost no increase in your kit’s weight or size. There is a price to pay, however, and you will lose one stop of light. This means that your 500mm f4 will now have a maximum aperture of f5.6, but its focal length becomes 700mm. You can buy cheap teleconverters, but these are not a good investment and result in poor-quality images. I would only use Canon teleconverters, and Nikon users should only use Nikon converters. I also own a Canon 2x converter, which gives an area magnification of 4x. A 2x converter turns your 500mm lens into a 1,000mm lens, but you lose two stops, so the maximum aperture becomes f8. I don’t use my 2x often, partly because of the two-stop loss, but mainly because I can detect a slight loss of quality when using the 2x that isn’t there with the 1.4x converter.
Most of my lenses are Image Stabilized (IS), which I find very useful. With this technology you can hand-hold a lens at a much lower speed than would be possible with a normal lens and still get sharp results. In recent years Nikon has begun to produce workable versions of this technology as well, which it calls Vibration Reduction (VR). Although it’s considered by some to be a bit of a gimmick, I wouldn’t be without it because it enables me to hand-hold in quite dull light, and frees me from the restrictions of carrying a tripod all the time.
IN PLACES WHERE BIRDS ARE APPROACHABLE, SUCH AS ANTARCTICA, I FIND THAT, BECAUSE OF ITS LIGHTNESS AND FLEXIBILITY, A TELEPHOTO ZOOM LENS LIKE THE CANON 100–400MM IS BEST FOR CATCHING THE ACTION, AS IN THIS SHOT OF A KING PENGUIN (APTENODYTES PATAGONICUS) BEING HIT BY A WAVE WHEN IT ENTERS THE SEA.
TRIPODS AND HEADS
There is no doubt that a sturdy tripod is essential for supporting your camera when there’s a big telephoto lens attached to it. Many professionals seem to prefer a Gitzo tripod and they are no doubt built to a high standard. Personally I feel they are overpriced, and I really don’t like the twist action that is required to release and tighten the legs. I use a Manfrotto tripod, which has quick-release catches instead of the infernal twist mechanism, and it is a fraction of the price of a Gitzo. It is certainly sturdy enough to securely hold my heaviest camera-lens combination, and has survived some extremely rough treatment all over the world.
Because I travel the world quite a lot, the weight of my tripod is very important to me, so I did investigate carbon-fibre tripods. After looking at the various models available, I decided to stick to my trusty Manfrotto 055 metal tripod, which weighs just over 2kg. This is only slightly heavier than the very expensive carbon-fibre models, and I’m sure it will take more punishment.
When using a long lens there is no better tripod head than the Wimberley, which revolutionized the use of telephoto lenses for flight and action photography. The Wimberley is a gimbal type that enables you to rotate the lens around its centre of gravity instead of balancing the lens squarely on top, as with a normal head. Once your camera and lens are correctly mounted and aligned on the head, the whole set-up becomes effectively weightless, and you can move even the heaviest of lenses very quickly in almost any direction you want. It also works much better than a ball head when you are in one position all the time, waiting for something to happen. With the ball head you have to constantly slacken and tighten the head when you want to point your lens at a bird, whereas with the Wimberley your camera will sit balanced freely on the head, ready for action at a moment’s notice. One down side of the Wimberley is that it is very heavy, weighing around 3kg in its latest version. Another is that it can only be used with telephoto lenses that have a tripod collar. I wouldn’t be without one, though.
THE MARK 2 VERSION OF THE WIMBERLEY HEAD (LEFT), IS SMALL AND LIGHTER THAT THE ORIGINAL MODEL (RIGHT).
A WIMBERLEY HEAD ON A MANFROTTO 055 TRIPOD, SUPPORTING A CANON 1DS BODY, CANON 500MM F4 LENS AND 1.4X CONVERTER. THE HEAD IS NOT TIGHTENED, BUT DUE TO THE GIMBAL NATURE OF THE HEAD YOU CAN SIMPLY WALK AWAY FROM THE SET-UP AND THE LENS SITS THERE, PERFECTLY BALANCED.
Wimberley also produces what it calls a ‘sidekick’, which is much lighter, but has to be fitted to a ball head. The whole thing is a bit of a compromise and when you add the weight of the ball head, you’re not really saving anything. If you’re going to go for a Wimberley, do it properly and get the full version.
I always take a ball head with me. I don’t often use it for bird photography, but I do photograph many other natural history subjects, as well as landscapes, where a ball head is essential. For years I used an Arca Swiss ball head, but on a trip to Antarctica an American photographer showed me a tiny ball head that he bought in the US from a company called Really Right Stuff. It is designed to hold up to 4kg of camera and lens, and is not expensive – I ordered one as soon as I got back to the UK and have been very happy with it – its weight is under 200g and it will slip into a pocket with ease.
THREE DIFFERENT TRIPOD HEADS:
A – REALLY RIGHT STUFF MINI BALL HEAD
B – ARCA SWISS BALL HEAD
C – WIMBERLEY HEAD MARK II
OTHER PHOTOGRAPHIC ITEMS
Your camera will almost certainly come with a single rechargeable battery and charger. You will want at least one spare battery per camera body. Canon and Nikon batteries are very expensive, but you can buy independent makes of battery to match your camera at a fraction of the cost, which I’ve found work just as well.
I don’t use flash a great deal, but if I do need it I generally use it at some distance away with a telephoto lens – and the more powerful the flashgun the further it will throw its light. To increase the distance for flash photography with a telephoto lens, I use a ‘Better Beamer’. This is a very simple device that utilizes a plastic fresnel lens in front of the flashgun to concentrate the beam of light and throw it at least twice the distance as the flashgun would without it. The Better Beamer is cheap, light and takes up little room in your bag when not in use.
THIS IS MY THINKTANK BAG PACKED WITH GEAR FOR A TYPICAL BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY TRIP. IT FITS WITHIN THE REGULATION SIZE FOR HAND LUGGAGE. THE EQUIPMENT IS:
1 – 500MM F4 LENS WITH LENS HOOD (LENS-HOOD COVER REMOVED FOR CLARITY)
2 – CONVERTERS. THE 1.4X AND 2X ARE STACKED IN THIS ONE COMPARTMENT
3 – TWO SPARE CAMERA BATTERIES (OTHERS ARE IN HOLD LUGGAGE)
4 – CAMERA BODY (IN THIS CASE A CANON EOS 1D MARK II)
5 – CARD WALLETS CONTAINING 40–50 GIGABYTES OF CF AND SD CARDS
6 – CAMERA BODY (IN THIS CASE A CANON EOS 1DS MARK II)
7 – TELEPHOTO ZOOM (IN THIS CASE 70–200 MM, BUT COULD BE 100–400MM INSTEAD)
8 – STANDARD ZOOM (IN THIS CASE 24–105 MM)
Finally, you’ll need a bag to put all your gear in and keep it safe. For years I used a Lowepro Phototrekker. This has put up with a remarkable amount of abuse over the years and has travelled the world with me. Recently, though, I discovered a new bag on the market that I think is better. This is the Thinktank Airport Acceleration. Both are backpack-type bags, which are best for bird photographers as they are comfortable to carry on your back for long distances, even those large enough to comfortably hold a 500mm lens. The advantage of the Thinktank bag is that it has been designed by photographers specifically to make the most of the hand luggage size limits imposed by many countries and airlines. Whereas the Lowepro bag curves inwards towards the top, the Thinktank bag has a square top that gives more space inside, without affecting the overall dimensions of the bag. The other advantage is that the Thinktank bag is flat, again making the most of the depth available for camera gear, whereas the Lowepro has a padded base. This feature is designed by Lowepro to make life easier when carrying the bag on your back, but restricts the depth of the bag when trying to meet the airline size restrictions. In addition, the Thinktank bag has a removable pouch to take your laptop.
Both Lowepro and Thinktank bags might seem expensive for mere camera bags, but the quality of the materials and workmanship is superb, and they will last for many years. Your camera gear will probably have cost you thousands of pounds, so don’t skimp on the bag you carry it around in.
DIGITAL STORAGE
In digital cameras the images are written to removable storage devices known as memory cards. There are several types of card, but the most common are CF (compact flash) and SD (secure digital) cards. The Canon professional cameras are able to take both types of card. As is the case with most technology, the prices of these cards have fallen dramatically in the last few years, and at the same time the storage capability has increased. The number of images you can get on each card depends on its storage capacity, which is measured in gigabytes. At the moment, 2gb to 8gb cards are used most often by photographers, and I wouldn’t recommend anything smaller.
If you’re simply going out for the day, then several memory cards will probably be enough to cope with the number of pictures that you are likely to take. If you are away for longer than this, it is highly likely that you will take many more pictures than your cards can hold. You will need some method of offloading your memory cards to a separate storage system so you can reuse your cards. The most common and by far the best method is to download your images onto a laptop computer using a special card reader (built-in or separate). Once your images are on the laptop you can review them and delete those that you don’t want immediately, so you reduce your storage requirements immediately. This initial edit of your digital images enables you to review your work and make any adjustments for the next session of picture-taking. There are a number of card readers on the market, and if your laptop has no integral reader it is worth investing in one of the more expensive peripherals as they download the data more quickly than the cheap ones.
There is a cardinal rule with the storage of any data on a computer: always make at least two separate copies on different devices, because computer equipment is liable to sudden and complete failure. Ignore this rule at your peril!
I would recommend the use of portable hard drives to provide a second back-up to your laptop. These are small and inexpensive, but make sure you get one that is described as BUS powered. This means that the power to run the drive is obtained from the USB port of your laptop, so you don’t have to find a mains socket to use the drive and can use it when you’re running your laptop off its battery. Once you have edited the images you have just downloaded, copy them all to the portable hard drive. This will provide you with two copies, one on your laptop and one on your hard drive. Only once you have secured your images with two copies in this way should you reformat your memory cards to make them ready for your next session. Most laptops have DVD drives fitted as standard and you could write the images to a DVD and use this as a back-up. I wouldn’t recommend this, however, as in my experience DVDs are far more likely to fail than a portable hard drive, and are a far less flexible means of storage.
There are a number of portable storage devices on the market that don’t require a laptop and once downloaded enable you to view your images on a small screen. They are small and lightweight, and do seem to be quite popular with some photographers, but I would not recommend them for the following reasons:
• Most important is that once your precious pictures are downloaded onto the laptop you can make as many copies as you want. You could overcome this drawback by having two of the portable storage devices, but this means that you would have to download all your cards separately to each device, and if you wanted to edit to save space you would have to do so twice – once on each device.
• On your laptop you can use the same software used on other computers to view and edit the images.
• It is much easier to edit pictures on the larger screen of a laptop than on small viewer screens.
• If you have problems with a card, such as lost images, you can use your laptop to run recovery programs and retrieve these images.
• Lastly, a laptop can perform many other tasks, and with so many places now providing wireless Internet access, you can keep track of your emails, update your website if you have one and do a host of other things.
Laptops vary enormously in specification and price, but if you want to use yours primarily for downloading, editing and copying images, you really don’t need a high-spec machine, as none of these tasks requires a fast processor or lots of RAM (working memory). A large-capacity hard drive is very useful, though, for storing as many images as possible. If you travel a lot, weight will be a key consideration and unfortunately lighter laptops are often more expensive. However, note that at the time of writing many manufacturers are launching low-price, basic, ultra-small laptops or ‘web-books’. These may be worth investigating once they have been on the market longer and any problems have been ironed out. The really lightweight machines have smaller screens, which are not as convenient for editing your images as larger ones. Overall I would aim for a machine no heavier than 2.5kg.
THE 12-INCH LAPTOP ON THE LEFT IS MADE BY LENOVO AND WEIGHS IN AT AROUND 1KG. THE MORE CONVENTIONAL 15-INCH LAPTOP ON THE RIGHT IS MADE BY ACER AND WEIGHS OVER TWICE AS MUCH, BUT COSTS ROUGHLY A THIRD OF THE PRICE OF THE SMALLER MODEL.
The image library
You will be amazed at how many digital images you will accumulate in a short amount of time. In the days of film nearly all bird photographers would use slide film which, once processed, produced physical ‘originals’ to be filed in sheets and stored in folders or filing cabinets. With digital there is no such thing any more as an ‘original’ file, as even the RAW file that you end up with in your photo library has been copied from one storage device to another, almost certainly more than once, and the original file produced by the camera and the first copy to the memory card is long gone. With digital technology, each RAW file can be copied an infinite number of times, so devising a system to store your images is even more essential than with physical slides. I’ve tried to keep the technical stuff out of this book as much as possible, but I’m afraid that explaining the essentials of building a digital photo library require me to delve a little deeper into these boring bits.
The first thing you have to remember is that you are storing computer data – it just happens that we view it as a picture, but essentially it is a (rather long) stream of ones and zeroes, just like any other piece of computer data. Once you’ve decided which images you are going to keep you need to assign an identifier to each one to make them unique. There is a lot of advice out there about how to name your images, suggesting that the file names should include species name, location, date, what the weather was like and so on, but this does not comply with good IT data standards and I would strongly advise against this approach. As is the case with all computer data, you need a simple unique reference (known as a key) that does not contain any information about what is on the image. This may sound counter intuitive, but trust me on this one – it is the right way to go. Having been in the IT business for many years I’ve witnessed many serious problems caused by the failure to create such a unique ‘meaningless’ key to data. This is why we all have a unique national insurance number and unique customer numbers when we deal with big companies – a unique reference enables databases to access your details quickly and with confidence that they are the correct details. I would suggest that a sequential number makes up most of the name for the image, but would prefix this with a letter. An example would be:
A001234
I recommend starting with a letter (any letter will do), which will result in the full name of your file always being displayed and printed. If the letter A was not present on the example above, for instance, the file name printed out or seen in a spreadsheet could well be 1234 and not 001234, as the spreadsheet software would treat it as a number rather than simply a name. Having the letter in the front prevents this and avoids confusion.
The name is applied to the RAW files before they are converted to tiffs. Then type the name, place and any other details you want to record into the IPTC data of the RAW file. When you convert your file to produce a tiff file, all this information (including the file name) will be automatically transferred to the tiff file. This means that you end up with a RAW file and a tiff file that have the same name – using the example above this will be A001234. This is essential as both files represent the same image. In fact, although they have the same name, each of the two files has a different suffix, .tif for the tiff file (no surprises there) and CR2 for the Canon RAW file. (This may vary with different cameras, but that doesn’t matter.)
The RAW file is the closest you are going to get to a digital original, so you must store this. I don’t intend to cover Adobe Photoshop processing as this would take up a book on its own, but when you convert a RAW to a tiff it is standard practice to do this as a 16-bit file. After you have made all your adjustments in Photoshop, you convert that 16-bit file to an 8-bit file, which is the preferred format for photo libraries and publishers. Many people recommend keeping the 16-bit tiff in case you want to rework it in Photoshop at some point in the future, but I only store the final 8-bit version – I rarely find that I need to rework an image, and a 16-bit file takes up twice the storage space of an 8-bit file.
So having saved the two versions of your file with meaningless file names, how do you know what they show and where you should put them? The answer to both of these questions is to store them in appropriately named folders. With a subject like birds it is pretty straightforward – you simply have a high-level folder named ‘Birds’ under which you build any number of folders to reflect the species of which you have pictures.
Exactly which structure you use doesn’t really matter as long as you are happy with it and understand it. You may, for example, decide that you want every single species to have its own folder under ‘Birds’, so you would simply create a long list of folders under birds as in figure 1, opposite. When you photograph a new species you can simply add a new folder. The folders can be displayed in alphabetical order so it is very easy to find the pictures of the species you want.
Alternatively, you might decide to group different types of bird together as in figure 2, opposite, where all the ducks are gathered together under one folder, with a species folder under the ducks folder for each duck species. If you already have a library of physical slides, you can organize your digital images in exactly the same way as this – simply create folders and sub-folders to reflect the structure of your slide library.
Looking at the diagrams on the right, you will notice that there is a separate folder under each species for RAW and tiff files. I find it most convenient to keep the two types of file separate, but you can if you wish store both files in the same folder.
Using this approach I have all the images in one easy-to-find location. I don’t need to have the species as the name of the file because I know where to find it from the structure of the library. It is a simple but effective method, and if you think of the structure as a filing cabinet, it works in exactly the same way as the filing cabinet or folders that you used to store your slides in.
Once you have your RAW and tiff images stored away, you must apply the cardinal rule of computer storage and back them up to another device.
If the internal drives on your computer are large enough to hold your library, you must use an external hard drive (or drives depending on the size of your library) as a back-up copy. If your computer does not have the space to hold the library, then you can simply use two hard drives, with a copy on each. You needn’t copy the whole library every time you add to it – just add the new images to each of the two copies when they are ready to be stored. This minimizes the risk of data corruption to your existing images, because every time you copy an image there is a small risk of data loss.
You have now established your basic digital photo library. Should you have a failure on one drive you must immediately take another back-up to a new drive to ensure that you always have two copies. Failure to do this could be disastrous, and you could lose many if not all of your precious images.
Congratulations if you got this far – I did warn you that this was the boring bit. However, discussions about this subject with many fellow photographers have made it clear to me that good, established computer naming and storage principles are one of the least understood aspects of this new digital world that we now inhabit, yet one of the most important.
