My conversion to digital photography began in 1999 when I bought a Nikon Coolpix E950. This is a 2 megapixel digital camera that provides 1600x1200 resolution and good quality 8" x 10" color prints. This camera had received good reviews at the time and I was generally happy with its performance. Although it lacks zoom capability, for its day it was a very good choice.
The Coolpix E950 is easy to use and provides very sharp images, although the color temperature for some images was a little too low, resulting in a slightly bluish cast especially for indoor shots. It came with a 8 MB Compact Flash memory card, although I quickly replaced it with a more capacious 32 MB CF card. The 3x optical zoom Nikkor lens is an excellent piece of glass, with the capability to provide accurate color and sharp definition. The metering choices are spot, center-weight and a 256-element matrix weighted average, and I used all three metering modes. The spot mode is especially good for strongly back-lit subjects, and in some ways is better than more expensive cameras I have used since. The camera is powered from AA batteries, but battery life is poor. I soon learned to take along a brace of spare AA cells.
I took over a thousand pictures with this camera until February 2003 when I bought a Canon PowerShot G3. Both of these cameras are relatively small, are ergonomically well-designed, and are fairly unobtrusive when shooting family pictures - an important feature, I was to discover.
The Canon PowerShot G3 was the next step up the digital photo ladder. This camera provides 4 megapixel images with a wide choice of image sizes and quality. The best resolution is 2272 x 1704 pixels, with quality ranging from RAW to SuperFine JPEGs down to Normal JPEGs. The RAW image file size is twice the SuperFine JPEG file size. I have shot nearly all my images in the Large Superfine resolution/quality mode. It has a 4X zoom lens, and is powered by a rechargeable BP-511 lithium ion battery. I can get about 200 - 300 pictures on a single charge, but could increase that if I turned off the LCD screen. I like the LCD images, so I leave it on for all shots.
Image quality is excellent and the embedded DIGIC processor chip is a marvel of engineering, providing outstanding photo quality and faster image transfers to CF memory. Like the Nikon CoolPix E950, the G3 uses a compact flash card. I use a 512 MB CF card, which provides plenty of capacity: 247 images in Large Superfine mode. The camera is not quite small enough to fit into a coat pocket, but weighs only 1 lb with battery, so it's easy to carry with intuitive controls. The LCD screen can be swiveled out and twisted, so the camera can be held at waist height and shots taken more or less surreptitiously especially if the built-in flash is turned off. The G3 can provide both exposure and focus bracketing, excellent features that are especially in tricky lighting situations.
As of October 2004, I'm still using the G3 and it always finds room in my carry-on shoulder bag when I'm traveling. I've taken several thousand pictures with it and have only one minor complaint. The lens cap, which used to fit snugly over the lens when I got the camera, no longer does. It is tethered to the camera with a small lens strap, thankfully. But it falls off with only the slightest provocation, and I haven't yet come up with a fix that works well.
Spending summers in Maine, and being an amateur (very amateur) birder has greatly increased my appetite for high quality bird photography. At our summer place on the lake, there are many photo opportunities for loons, eagles, osprey, kingfishers, great blue herons and much smaller birds in the warbler and sparrow class. Although the common loon and mallard are easily approachable with a small focal length camera such as the Canon G3, the rest of these birds are decidedly camera-shy and a much longer focal length lens (at least 400 mm) is required.
On a trip to Japan over thirty years ago and at a time when the exchange was 360 yen to the US dollar, I purchased for a relatively modest sum several Canon lenses including a 200 mm zoom. I used these with my Canon EOS SLR film camera and was very happy with the quality of the photos and the general photographic experience. I even went so far as to build a small darkroom with enlarger at my then home in New Mexico. I developed and printed some nice 16" x 20" B&W prints. By the mid-1980s I had moved to Massachusetts, built a new house with space and plumbing for a nice darkroom. After that I remarried. The to-be darkroom looked like a laundry room to my new bride, and within a year or so I had donated all my darkroom equipment including Beseler 23C enlarger, trays, etc. to the daughter of a neighborhood friend. She was a budding photographer and had far more need of a chemical process than I did. I actually wasn't sorry to give up chemical development of photos, a messy procedure that ruined several pairs of pants and at least two pairs of shoes.
Six months ago I bought the Canon EOS 10D as a digital back to my fine old collection of Canon lenses. Of course I discovered that I now needed two more lenses, the 100-400 mm IS zoom for bird photography and a 17 - 40 mm zoom for wide-angle scenery.
The Canon EOS 10D is a 6.3 megapixel SLR that can provide up to 3072 x 2048 pixel images in either RAW format or compressed JPEG formats. It uses a single-plate CMOS image sensor and the new Canon DIGIC image processor that improves image quality and speedy processing. I have found this to be an outstanding feature, especially when shooting a rapid sequence of 6.3 MP photos, with rapid image transfer to the CF card. Like the Canon G3, the EOS 10D uses a rechargeable BP-511 lithium-ion battery. Battery life is fairly short (maybe 50 shots or so) if an autofocus lens with image stabilization (IS) is used, since the battery powers both the camera and the lens. I always take at least two BP-511 spares with me for a day's shooting.
The Canon EOS 10D offers several metering choices: center-area spot metering (over the center 10% of the image), or center-weighted average, or a very sophisticated 35-zone TTL evaluative metering linked to all focus points. The white balance can be set to Auto, or six presets (sunlight, cloudy, flash, etc.) or manual (2800 to 10,000 degrees K). I have found that the presets tend to shoot outdoor scenes anywhere from 500 K to 1000 K cooler (more blue) than my eyes tell me about scene warmth. Fortunately when shooting RAW images this is easy to correct with software such as C1 or Photoshop CS. ISO sensitivity can be varied from a low of 100 to a high of 1600. The higher ISO values of 800 or 1600 give noticeable digital noise, although at ISO 800 this noise can be reduced to acceptable levels using image processing software such as Photoshop CS. For bird shooting I usually use either ISO 400 or ISO 800 because fast shutter speeds (at least 1/500 sec) are required.
The EOS 10D accepts either CF type II memory cards or IBM memory drives. I use a 1 GB IBM microdrive, which allows me to record 197 full-sized RAW images.
This is an excellent entry-level DSLR for serious bird photography. Its performance is well above that of prosumer models but at less than one fourth the cost of the high-end SLR digital cameras. I was very happy with its performance, and used it extensively in 2004-2005.
| Canon EOS 5D | |
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In 2006, I graduated from the Canon EOS 10D to the lighter-weight EOS 5D, an especially good camera for high-quality scenics. The EOS 5D features a 35 mm full-frame sensor, so there is no multiplier effect of 1.6 as there was for the 10D or 20D. It is also lighter weight than the 10D or 20D and has a much larger (2.5") LCD display. The camera's exterior is a highly rigid magnesium alloy, with a stainless steel frame and a high-impact mirror box - all of which gives it a very solid feel. Controls are arranged similarly to the 20D, so I quickly learned how to change many of the settings (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.) while looking through the viewfinder. This is essential in bird photography where the subject is usually moving very quickly. The viewfinder is clearer than for the 20D, and the 5D now has 9 autofocus points, again a big help for shooting moving targets. The BP-11 battery life seems reasonable to me, although I always carry one or two fully-charged spares.
| Canon EOS 1D Mark III | |
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My most recent camera is the Canon 1D Mark III, an especially great camera for bird photos. It has 19 autofocus points, and acquires focus much more quickly than the 5D. Also, it shoots RAW images at 10 frames per second in burst mode, a tremendous advantage for capturing details of bird action. It has a 3" LCD display, and battery life is excellent.
For bird photography with the 1D Mk III, I use the Canon 500 mm image-stabilized lens with a 1.4X teleconverter, giving an effective focal length of 700 mm. I use a Gitzo 1325 carbon-fiber tripod with a Wimberly el-az head. This makes it possible to easily manuever the camera/lens combination, again a necessity for shooting smaller songbirds.