When I tell people that I like digital photography, the standard reaction is, “that makes sense.”  This makes me wonder. Why does it make sense?  I guess they look at  a person who loves audio/video technology and consider photography a natural extension of that.  Or they think any technical A/V guy (OK, geek), will also want to dabble in photography.  As you see below, there is more truth to this wisdom than one wants to accept.  I think all engineers at some level, want to think that they can also dabble in the artistic side of things.  Photography brings a nice hedge here as half the challenge is technical. So to the extent you flunk the artistic side but master the technical aspect, you can still call yourself a photographer. 

I got into photography shortly after I got married in the early 1980s.  I bought a Canon AE-1 mostly because of the above reason. I saw that it had an LED display and thought I must own a high-tech gadget like that. Sadly, I soon learned that an analog (“match needle”) exposure display was far more powerful as you could see what your set exposure was, relative to what the camera thought it should be at.  So on I went to invest in  Canon’s then top of the line professional camera, the F-1.  I learned the basics of exposure (“Sunny 16”).  Then I made my first mistake and that was becoming interested in wildlife photography.  I say mistakenly because wildlife photography requires an investment in long lenses which automatically means a big spending budget.  I think there should be a Surgeon General warning on any book on wildlife photography, saying wildlife photography is highly damaging to your pocketbook! Wildlife photography doesn’t get “interesting” until you move into 400mm and longer lenses. Worse yet, the best are the professional lines which cost even more. There is a reason Canon designates their high-end lines as “L” series which stands for Luxury. And luxury it is and something I badly lacked in those days. So I opted to get a 300 F4L lens and got stuck with a very limited set of capabilities, relative to the great body I was attaching it to.

Still, I had fun with what I had to work with. I was living in Florida at the time, with good access to larger birds. I lugged my equipment (all of it, including my heavy Bogen tripod with the pan/tilt heads which were all the rage at the time) on all vacations and business trips. But the results were frankly not there. My keeper rate was very low, probably more random than anything predictable. And then our family grew, work got more intense and soon, I just couldn’t bring myself to lug all that heavy equipment around the world just to come back with the results that I was getting.  So I went ahead and packed away all the gear, including the Cibachrome darkroom equipment I was using to print my own slides.

Fast forward some 20 years later, and something caught my eye. Namely, the Canon 10D digital body with its 6 megapixels and very reasonable cost (compared to much more expensive digital cameras before it at lower resolution/performance). Reviews showed it to rival film which at first I did not believe, but sure enough, the performance was more than good enough to get me back in the game. But then something stopped me. I remembered that I used to get hassled a ton for my choice of Canon in the old days. Everyone at the time swore by Nikon.  All the pros used them and you could not pick a photography book that didn’t showcase Nikon equipment. To my surprise, while I was asleep so to speak during these two decades, Canon had mounted a revolution, completely turning this situation around. The key innovation was Image Stabilization (IS)  which Canon had deployed widely in their lenses whereas Nikon had far fewer offerings.  Perhaps more importantly, everyone swore by Canon being the standard choice, rather than the other way around, as evidenced by Canon ads of sporting events, showing a majority of long lenses being white (i.e. Canon L series).  So with much excitement, I jumped back into the Canon line yet again.

Boy, was I in for a pleasant surprise. People talk about the benefits of digital but there is one key component that is not mentioned.  That is what I call the “closed feedback loop.” With film, you shoot a bunch of images, then wait days to get the results. With no metadata to tell you the shooting parameters, if you get bad results, there is no way to know what you did wrong.  With digital, the results are as close as the nearest computer.  In my shoots now, after the golden light of the morning is gone, I transfer the images from the flash card to the computer and can instantly examine both my technical and artistic skills. I can see if I used a fast enough shutter speed for example. Or dialed in enough depth of field for a close up shot or a bird’s head to get both the eye and the beak in focus. Or that certain framing worked better than others. I put all of these lessons to good use the following afternoon or the next morning. This fast feedback loop, allowed me to learn more about photography in 3 months than I had learned in 3 years the first go around! This ignited the photography passion in me like nothing before as I was soon creating images that I could not even dream about in the first round.

There are also other benefits. Like being able to send a few images to your loved ones at home, wondering what this crazy guy is doing at 4:00am at subzero temperatures, in the middle of New Mexico (“Bosque”) or some other remote area half way around the world. The miracle of modern communication allows me to do this now with my cellular modems from anywhere in the world, while still in the field! The kudos back in e-mail, gives one the motivation to repeat the cycle the next day and the one after that.  After all, we don’t just take pictures for our sake, but also to touch someone else with them.

Another thing that is nice now is  a healthier budget for photography allowing investment in “serious glass” (e.g. 600mm F4).  Getting older and later in your career does have some benefits. With teleconverters, I now have a level of reach that went well beyond anything I could imagine before. But there is also another unsung hero here. That is, the advent of carbon fiber tripods. My gitzo tripods weigh a fraction of my Bogen tripod yet they are solid as a rock and don’t fail as that one did. So while the lens became much heavier, the tripod nicely compensated for it.  Yes, carbon fiber tripods cost a fortune.  But did I mention that being older is nicer? I thought I did.

All in all, wildlife photography remains a challenging field even with these latest advancements.  There is no denying that you have to lug heavy equipment across many distances at times, chasing elusive animals who don’t want to be our willing subjects.  But technology advancements help and help a lot to make this a challenge that one can conquer.  In my upcoming posts, I will write about tools and techniques that help here.