Wildlife Watching

wildlink

Andrew Cooper's Guide to Wildlife Watching & Photography.

These pages are made possible by the kind sponsorship of
London Camera Exchange

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY – Compact v SLR DSLR Photography Tips for photographing wildlife
	COMPACT DIGITAL CAMERA The digital compact camera is the easiest to use for just point and shoot photography. The best ones seem to take care of everything apart from subject matter and composition! Many are very high quality with an integral lens and range from simple pocket cameras to the higher specification ‘Bridge’ camera. The most useful have an optical 2-3X zoom lens.
If looking to buy such a camera ignore the ones with just advertise a digital zoom. When used these cameras might give the appearance of being zoomed in while actually just cropping the wide angle image. The resulting ‘zoom’ therefore suffers in resolution. Stick to an ‘optical’ zoom for better quality. The so called Bridge camera is actually a high-end compact. Typically having a 10-12x optical zoom lenses, some even boast an image stabiliser to help prevent camera shake at low shutter speeds. Some Bridge cameras also have a manual zoom - very useful for wildlife, because it gives you more control over quick composition. The main advantage of a compact camera is that they are so easy to carry and use. There is no need to lug around a bag full of lenses and more importantly, there is no chance of getting dust on the image sensor. Compact digitals can suffer from long delays between pressing the shutter release & taking the picture, which can be disastrous in wildlife photography! Viewfinders are often indifferent or non existent, forcing the photographer to hold the camera rather awkwardly in order to view the image on the rear screen.
DIGITAL SLR CAMERA If you are serious about your photography or would just like to do better while still having fun, choose a DSLR camera. Usually more expensive than compacts they can do so much more and the quality is only limited by your budget
DSLR cameras allow the addition of many different lenses which make them much more versatile for wildlife photography. Some older film camera lenses will also work on DSLR but not all, so check before you buy. The biggest bonus about digital photography is that there is no additional cost for film and you can see your results instantly.
It helps to know about: Crop Factor Inside most DSLR’s the sensor that captures the image covers a much smaller area than a 35mm film camera. So when you use a lens designed for a 35mm camera you get what is known as a crop factor. The effect is a slight magnification of the final image. For example the Canon 400D or 30D is 1.6x whereas the Nikon D50 is 1.5x, and if you think that is confusing, the Olympus is surprisingly large 2x. A common misunderstanding is that the crop factor alters the focal length of the lens – it does not. The focal length of a lens is not altered but the quality of the image and the amount of information recorded certainly is. Most professional cameras use a larger sensor to produce a higher quality image even though the camera may have the same number of pixels as a less expensive equivalent. For instance the Canon EOS 30D and the Canon 1D MKII cameras have the same 8 mega pixel performance but the pro 1D camera uses a sensor with only a 1.3x rather than the 30D’s 1.6x crop. The great advantage to the crop factor comes when using a telephoto lens. A 300mm lens used for wildlife photography on a Canon 400D will give you the benefit of a 480mm lens! The disadvantage comes at the other end of the lens scale. The image captured by a 35mm lens will appear narrower than a standard 50mm lens. So why not use an even wider angle lens? Extreme wide angle lenses (more than 20mm) tend to suffer from edge distortion of the image. It is because of this that landscape photographers use full frame DSLR or larger medium format cameras.
24mm wide angle lens showing an approximate 1.6x sensor crop on a full frame Dust on the sensor Some digital SLR cameras are more vulnerable to dust than others. Even the smallest speck on the sensor will show up on every picture. Each time you change a lens dust may get into the camera. Keeping your equipment scrupulously clean was always important to avoid scratched film, now it is even more important! Most particles of dust can be removed using a blower but stubborn marks should be cleaned professionally. The majority of photographers clean the sensor themselves. There are many websites that give instructions how to do this but not surprisingly none accept responsibility for scratched or damaged sensors. RAW/JPEG Recording Canon EOS digital SLRs can record images as either a RAW image, JPEG image, or both simultaneously. RAW images are more like a digital negative containing all the unprocessed data from the camera’s sensor. Recorded at 12 bits per pixel, RAW images provide the maximum flexibility when you come to post processing. Picture Style information is stored in the image header, so individual image parameters can be adjusted after the shoot without affecting the original image data. Picture Style settings will only be fixed in the image if it is converted to a JPEG and Digital Photo Professional software is provided for RAW image handling. JPEG images are compressed and Picture Style processing applied so your pictures are designed to be more usable straight out of the camera.