10,000 Birds

I’ve been very fortunate in the four years I’ve been blogging to have received a fair few comments congratulating me on the photographs I’ve taken. I’m very grateful of course, but I have to say that given the opportunities I get from travelling the world with my airline job I’d be a poor photographer indeed if I hadn’t managed to capture the odd decent photo occasionally.

 

Sunset near Cape Town

 

I mean to say, if the fabulous light and scenery in eg Cape Town or California, the stunning birdlife of say Mexico or the Middle East, or the sights and colours of India or Australia don’t inspire you to press the right buttons in the right order then nothing will. However, having said that, my esteemed colleagues here on 10,000 Birds have let me know that they think there’s more to what I do than just point and hope for the best, and that I ought to put together a short series of posts on ‘getting the best out of your digital camera’ or somesuch. Who am I to argue?

 

Grey (Red) Phalarope

 

Who am I to be dispensing advice, might be the next question to ask? I’m going to be completely upfront here and say right from the outset that I’m not an especially expert photographer. My dear old mother used to tell me I “had a good eye for a picture”, but most mothers don’t tell their aspiring children they’re hopeless of course, and I don’t personally think that the sort of photography I do actually requires a “good eye”. I don’t usually have the time to worry too much about composition when I’m wandering around trying to get a decent photo - ANY decent photo - of the birds I see. I’m more of a “If it’s there, take it” photographer, and I’ve a feeling that the majority of birders wouldn’t aspire to being much more than that either.

That’s not to say that I simply snap away and hope for a good outcome (actually, sometimes I do thinking about it). What I try to do is help the camera perform at its best, and even I realise that some of the photos I post on this blog are pretty good - but I am not an ‘authority’ or a qualified professional, and I wouldn’t dream of criticising or judging someone else’s work (that’s what snooty “pros” and $100/day courses are for folks). What I would prefer to do is look at real-life field situations as faced by a real-world birder with a relatively-affordable camera set-up (that’s me, by the way), because where I think I do score highly is that I’ve been birding most of my life (so I know my subject matter well); I use the most expensive equipment my credit card can afford - which is half the battle won in my opinion; and I’m good at post-processing any photo I take that I later might want to use (like everyone else I delete far more photos than I keep).

 

A cropped, dodged, sharpened, white-balanced Acorn Woodpecker

 

Rather, then, than try to write a series of posts on ‘the creative use of depth of field’ or ‘how to photograph the inside of a building using flash’, I plan to write about what I know: how to occasionally take a photo to be proud of, and how not to worry about the photos you wouldn’t even show your overly-proud mother. So if that’s of interest to you, please feel free to dive into what I’m calling, ‘How to be a quite good bird photographer’.

 

DIGITAL PHOTO GLOSSARY

Okay, to get the series rolling I’m going to have a quick look at the “language” of digital photography. The following glossary defines some commonly used words and phrases in the usual 10,000 Birds style. Take notes, bookmark this page, or have a coffee evening and invite some friends around and turn this useful list into a parlour-game, because I’ll be using these terms in succeeding posts, and I’m going to expect you to know them… (oh, only joking: I’ll put handy clickable links everywhere, because if they’re new to you they can get a little confusing)…

 

• Ambient light: The natural light in a scene. Whether you take a photo at dawn, midday, or dusk, outside, in the shade, or indoors, if the light you’re using to take the photograph is natural then it’s always “ambient”.
• Aperture: An opening inside the lens that can be widened or narrowed to control the amount of light reaching the camera’s sensor. Aperture diameter is expressed in f-stops: confusingly the lower the f-stop number, the larger the aperture. For instance, the aperture opening when set to f/2.8 is larger than at f/11 (so more light reaches the sensor at f/2.8 than f/11 - which is why lenses that work at lower f-stops are so sought after). A photographer can control both the aperture and the shutter speed to control the total amount of light reaching the sensor. Digital cameras usually have an aperture priority mode (often titled ‘AV Mode’) that allows you to set a constant aperture, while the camera works out the shutter speed to get the best exposure.
• Buffer: Memory in the camera that stores digital photos before they are written to the memory card. The first digital cameras were very slow to transfer data from the processor to the memory card and had very small amounts of memory dedicated to storing this information. This meant that you had to wait until the data was written before you could take another photo, but most modern DSLRs “buffer” so much data that you can keep clicking away until your fingers hurt.
• Burning: Selectively darkening part of a photo with an image editing program.
• CCD: Charge Coupled Device: one of the two main types of image sensors used in digital cameras. When a picture is taken, the CCD is struck by light coming through the camera’s lens. Each of the thousands or millions of tiny pixels that make up the CCD convert this light into electrons. The number of electrons, usually described as the pixel’s accumulated charge, is measured, then converted to a digital value. This last step occurs outside the CCD, in a camera component called an analog-to-digital converter.
• CMOS: Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor: one of the two main types of image sensors used in digital cameras. Its basic function is the same as that of a CCD. CMOS sensors are increasingly found in “prosumer” digital cameras (including Canon’s 40D).
• CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. The four colors in the inksets of many photo-quality printers. Some printers use six ink colors to achieve smoother, more photographic prints. The two additional colors are often lighter shades of cyan and magenta.
• Compact camera: A small, relatively inexpensive camera with non-changeable lenses. Most modern compacts have megapixel counts and functions similar to more expensive DSLRs, but don’t work at the same breakneck speeds and usually don’t allow the kind of options or control a serious photographer may want.
• Contrast: The difference between the darkest and lightest areas in a photo. The greater the difference, the higher the contrast.
• Data: Data is simply information. Digital cameras store data as streams of numbers. These numbers can be changed (or ‘processed’) at many stages from capturing the original information right through to printing out the final photograph giving a vast range of options to the photographer - one of the reasons that digital photography has become so popular so quickly.
• De-saturate: To remove the colour from a photo. Why would you do that? As a way of replicating using black-and-white film in standard cameras…
• Digiscoping: A method of photography where a compact camera is either held up to or attached to a telescope, which is used in place of a long lens. It sounds easy, but it’s actually takes a lot of skill to get really clear, sharp images because the huge magnification of the scope also magnifies any movement of the camera, and the amount of light reaching the camera sensor is often very low.
• Digital camera: A camera that uses an electronic sensor rather than film to capture an image. The vast majority of cameras sold today are digital.
• Dodging: Selectively lightening part of a photo with an image editing program.
• Download, downloading: The process of moving computer data from one location to another. Though the term is normally used to describe the transfer, or downloading, of data from the internet, it is also used to describe the transfer of photos from a camera memory card to a computer.
• DSLR: Digital single-lens reflex camera. Usually relatively-expensive cameras that give a photographer great control over how a photograph will look and because of the alignment of the mirrors and viewfinder has far less parallax than a compact camera. DSLRs also allow a photographer to change the camera lens, giving a much broader range of options regarding which photos can be taken. (An SLR is the same but is non-digital and uses film.)
• EXIF: Exchangeable Image File: the file format used by most digital cameras. For example, when a typical camera is set to record a JPEG, it’s actually recording an EXIF file that uses JPEG compression to compress the photo data within the file.
• External flash: A flash unit that connects to the camera with a cable, or is triggered by the light from the camera’s internal (or ‘onboard’) flash.
• File: Any image, document, page of text, video etc stored on a computer is known as a file.
• Fill flash: A technique using flash to brighten deep shadow areas, typically when taking pictures of people’s faces outdoors on sunny days. Some digital cameras include a fill flash mode that forces the flash to fire, even in bright light.
• FireWire: A type of cabling technology for transferring data to and from digital devices at high speed. Some professional digital cameras and memory card readers connect to the computer over FireWire. Also known as IEEE 1394, FireWire was invented by those tech wizards at Apple Computer but is found on most Windows-based PCs as well.
• Greyscale: A photo made up of varying tones of black and white. Greyscale is synonymous with black and white.
• Highlights: The brightest parts of a photo.
• Histogram: A graphic representation of the range of tones from dark to light in a photo. Most digital cameras include a histogram feature that enables a precise check on the exposure of the photo.
• Image browser: An application that enables you to view digital photos on a computer, often as a slide-show. Most modern browsers allow you to rename files, convert photos from one file format to another, add text descriptions, and much more.
• Image editor: A computer program that enables you to adjust (or “post-process”) the data that makes up a digital photo. With image editing software (eg Photoshop), you can darken or lighten a photo, correct colour-balance, adjust contrast, crop out unwanted areas of the image, remove red-eye, and add extra wingbars to make a common phylloscopus warbler totally new for science.
• Image resolution: The number of pixels in a digital photo is commonly referred to as its image resolution - the higher the resolution, the more detail the photograph holds.
• Image stabiliser: An extremely clever mechanical juggling act, where motion sensors in a camera body or (more usually) in a camera lens compensates for a photographer’s shaking hands and “stabilises” the image. Manufacturers normally talk about how this function allows you to hand-hold the camera and take shots in lower-light than non-stabilised set-ups - I prefer to imagine the help it will give me the next time I find a first-for-the-world!
• ISO speed: A rating of a film’s sensitivity to light. Though digital cameras don’t use film, they have adopted the same rating system for describing the sensitivity of the camera’s imaging sensor. Most Digital cameras (certainly all DSLRs) often include a control for adjusting the ISO speed; some will adjust it automatically depending on the lighting conditions, adjusting it upwards as the available light dims. Generally, as ISO speed climbs, image quality drops because of the introduction of “noise”.
• JPEG: A standard for compressing image data developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, hence the name JPEG. Strictly speaking, JPEG is not a file format, it’s a compression method that is used within a file format, such as the EXIF-JPEG format common to digital cameras. It is referred to as a lossy format, which means some quality is lost in achieving JPEG’s high compression rates. Usually, if a high-quality, low-compression JPEG setting is chosen on a digital camera, the loss of quality is not detectable to the eye.
• LCD: Liquid Crystal Display - a low-power monitor often used on the top and/or rear of a digital camera to display settings or the photo itself.
• Media: Material that information is written to and stored on. Digital photography storage media includes CompactFlash cards, CDs, and - increasingly in high-end video cameras especially - internal hard drives.
• Megabyte (MB): A measurement of data storage equal to 1024 kilobytes (KB).
• Megapixel: Not - as “mega” which means a thousand suggests - a thousand pixels, but one million pixels. When a digital camera is described as eg being ‘5 megapixel’ this describes the number of light-sensitive elements (photo-receptors) making up the sensor: the higher the “megapixel” count the more information the image should contain (but as not all processors - which handle the information - are created equal this doesn’t always hold true).
• Noise: “Noise” in a camera image often shows as a haze of tiny coloured specks. It comes from two main sources: firstly, the inherent noise in the camera’s electronic sensor (which is made worse by heat build up as electrical current passes through the processing chip) or by having too many photo receptors clustered onto a small chip. The second comes from raising the ISO: the ISO setting amplifies the signal through the chip, much like turning up the volume on a stereo (when the stereo is turned low there’s no hiss from the speakers, as it’s turned up hiss is increasingly introduced).
• Parallax. In older cameras there was a slight difference between what was seen through the viewfinder and what the camera recorded because the lens was set to one side of the viewfinder: this is known as parallax. The use of “live-view” monitors on compact digital cameras has virtually eliminated the problem there, and DSLRs use carefully aligned mirrors and viewfinder to ensure that what you see when you look through the viewfinder is what will be recorded.
• Photography: You probably know this, but the word ‘photography’ comes from the Greek words for light (photos) and writing/drawing (graphos). I always try to bear in mind that what I’m doing when I take a photograph is using light to create a picture: it may sound obvious, but it’s a surprisingly useful tip!
• Pixel: Stands for “picture element”. Digital photographs are comprised of millions of them (one million is a ‘megapixel’), and in essence they are the building blocks of a digital photo. Each pixel in a digital image has a numeric value which describes it’s colour, hue, and colour saturation: editing software works by changing a pixel’s value, and hence changing its colour, hue, or colour saturation level.
• Pixelation: A ruinous effect caused by displaying an image or part of an image at such a large size that the individual pixels that make up the image become visible as squares or “blocks” (hence a pixelated photo is often said to be “blocky”).
• Processor: Digital cameras all contain one, and they are essentially the “brains” of the camera working out what an image should look like based on the electronic data coming from the sensor. The better the processing chip, the better the image you see is likely to be.
• Prosumer: A portmanteau word created from ‘professional’ and ‘consumer’ and used to describe the middle ground between a cheap “consumer” camera and an expensive “professionals” camera. The Canon 40D, for instance, is usually described as “prosumer”.
• RAW: A RAW image contains all the data of the original image with no in-camera processing. RAW photos often look dull and unsaturated and have to be processed afterwards. Professional photographers often use RAW as it gives them complete freedom to process a photo so that it looks exactly the way they want it to.
• RGB: Red, Green, Blue. These are the three colors to which the human eye, digital cameras, and many electronic devices are sensitive.
• Saturation: How rich the colors are in a photo (hence “over-saturation” if the colours have been over-processed or over-edited to be too rich and unrealistic).
• Sensitivity: See ISO speed.
• Sharpness: The clarity of the details in a photo. Photo-editing programmes usually increase sharpness by “sharpening” the contrast between one pixel and the next.
• Shutter speed: The camera’s shutter speed is a measurement of how long its shutter remains open as the picture is taken. The slower the shutter speed, the longer the exposure time. When the shutter speed is set to 1/125 or simply 125, this means that the shutter will be open for exactly 1/125th of one second. The shutter speed and aperture together control the total amount of light reaching the sensor. Some digital cameras have a shutter priority mode that allows you to set the shutter speed to your liking.
• Slide show: No longer an awful collection of rubbish photographs your relatives make you watch, but a software programme that automatically cycles through selected photos on a computer or portable media player.
• Thumbnail: A small “thumbnail-sized” version of a photo. Most image browsers can display dozens of thumbnails at a time.
• USB: Universal Serial Bus: a protocol for transferring information (data) to and from digital devices. Digital cameras and memory card readers usually connect to the USB port on a computer with a USB cable. USB card readers are typically faster than cameras or readers that connect to the serial port, but slower than those that connect via FireWire. Most digital equipment now uses USB 2, which is much faster than the older USB 1.1
• White balance: Our remarkable brains allow us to perceive white as white, whatever the light source (eg a red sunset, or a fluorescent light which actually colours everything blueish). As clever as they are cameras still need a little help, and the “white-balance” function on a camera uses complicated maths to ensure that white areas of an image are indeed rendered as white.

   

  Coming next: RTBM…