Happy New Year! I recently sent out a quick newsletter with a couple of HDR shots to celebrate the New Year. If you are signed up and did not receive one, please let me know. I’ve had to recently revamp the distribution list and remove or update a lot of e-mail addresses.

Some of you have already written to me with some good questions, and I’ve tried to answer as many as I could. I’ll be posting these e-mail Q&A’s every few months, if I get enough of them, so please keep those questions coming. A few of you have also sent me links to your websites; and I have to say that your photography has really improved. I hope that this site has been and continues to be a good resource for you in learning techniques for photographing the wild.

Nature Photography must be taking off, because there are now a myriad of web sites and forums crowding the Internet. To name just a few of the major ones: NaturePhotographers.net, NatureScapes.net, PhotoMigrations.com, WildPhotographers.com, and the new BirdPhotographers.net. So if you want your photos critiqued by experts, you now have many choices. What’s interesting to see is the same picture posted by the same photographer on each of the different sites; and to see how each site critiques the same image differently. Some sites are very gentle, while others may seem to attack you for posting the image in the first place; and every site seems to be guilty of doing a little of both. It just goes to show how subjective and competitive nature, and particularly bird, photography has become. A bit of advice if you do post or decide to post on these image critique sites is to keep an open mind. Each person has their own unique style and way of doing things, and some will try to tell you how you should have taken that picture based on what they would have done. Learn from the critique, but don’t let it cramp your particular style, or convince you into doing something you’re not comfortable with.

The digital SLR revolution has really made this hobby affordable to many people. It used to cost tens of thousands of dollars to purchase the equipment needed to take great pictures, but today you can get started for around two thousand dollars (Canon EOS 400D / Digital Rebel XTi with Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM lens). It is still an expensive hobby, but becoming more and more affordable. It shows in the number of you that I see on the boardwalks of Wakodahatchee and Green Cay each week. Talking to many of you, the number one concern is really cost, and there are few web sites that cater to the cost conscious nature photographer. That’s my new goal for 2008, to give photography advice for nature photographers who want to keep your costs down.

Your second concern is how to make use of all that fancy equipment. Hopefully this site will be able to help you there as well.

The January 2008 gallery just opened and I’ll be adding pictures throughout the month, as always. Don’t forget to check out the Osceola / Brevard county images from our end of the year trip to Central Florida in the December gallery.

Labels: Green Cay, Newsletter, Reader Mail, Wakodahatchee

As a special year end recap, I’ve assembled some of the questions that you, the readers, have asked me over e-mail and my responses to them. I've broken them up into five separate postings below. I hope that other readers will benefit from the questions and answers, so keep those questions coming by sending e-mail to jayparedes@hotmail.com.

Also don't forget about the updated December gallery.

Labels: Reader Mail, Technique

I was out with my new Canon 400mm f/5.6 L lens and got some great flight shots. I had it set in aperture priority, ISO 400 at f/7.1. In some of the shots, the shutter speed went up to 1/4000s, which is not good. Any suggestions on how to bring the shutter speed down?

Getting your shutter speed down is easy. Simply dial in a smaller aperture (f/8 or higher) or lower your ISO. Since during flight shots the background is mostly blue sky, you'll get very fast shutter speeds on a sunny day. Watch out for when a bird flies lower and your background turns green, as your shutter speed will dramatically drop. In general I try to keep my shutter speed between 1/800 and 1/2000. At 1/2000 if the background changes and the shutter speed drops, I'm not so worried that I'll get a blurry shot.

I really need your help. I was not happy with any of my flight shots of the harrier. I know you shoot RAW and had the Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS L lens, but I was wondering, how did your pictures come out? The pictures I took of the harrier, none were sharp and the head was dark.

My images of the harrier were alright. I had three passes total yesterday and I was able to adjust the camera settings a little each time to get better results. About 50% of my images of the harrier were in focus. It was a bit more of a challenge using the Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS L lens plus Canon 2x converter because that combination makes focusing a bit slow, somewhat like the Canon 100-400mm f/3.5 – 5.6 IS L lens.

I found from the previous passes that the sky was very bright making the harrier very dark, so I added +1 exposure compensation to bring more details out in the bird. To get it as bright as I wanted I had to further adjust the exposure in the RAW image about another +1/4 stop. That makes the image a bit washed out, and then I had to adjust the blacks and contrast back in. RAW makes processing more flexible.

I was wondering what you do if you get a bird flying and it is full frame. When you go to print it, how do you print it without cropping and cutting off some of the wing or if is too close to the edge to mat?

I believe what your asking has to do with the image's aspect ratio. Canon cameras create files in the 3x2 format (more commonly known as 6x4), which is fine if you are printing images with the same ratio (i.e. 3x2, 6x4, 12x8, 18x12, etc). However, if you print to a different format, say 11x 14 you'll end up cropping part of the image. So if you have something that is full frame and tight, you'll cut off part of the image you want to keep. There are a couple ways to get around this. The first is when printing, in Adobe Photoshop, I use the scale to fit media check box. This will fit the image on to the paper size but you'll get white borders around the image. The other method I use only works if you have a clean background such as an almost solid green on blue. Use the canvas dialog in Photoshop to add more canvas around the image so that you get an aspect ratio of 14x11 (or 11x8.5, etc). Then use the clone tool to clone in the background of the original image to the blank part of the canvas.

Labels: Flight Photography, Reader Mail, Technique

I recently purchased a Canon 1.4 extender for use with my 100-400mm Canon lens. The extender does not allow my lens to auto focus. Does any manufacturer make a 1.4 extender that will allow my Canon lens to still auto focus? I would appreciate any suggestions that you might have.

You're right, the Canon 1.4 teleconverter will not allow you to auto focus with the Canon 100-400mm L f/3.5 - 5.6 lens. That's because most Canon camera bodies, with the exception of the 1D series will only auto focus if your lens aperture is f/5.6 or faster. The Canon 1.4 teleconverter adds 1 stop (f/1.4) of light loss to your lens, making its effective aperture f/8.0 (f/5.6 + f/1.4). So your Canon body will not autofocus. There are several workarounds for this issue, including using masking tape on some of the converter's pins, but most don't work very well. The only workaround that I use and recommend is to use the Tamron 1.4 extender instead of the Canon one. You'll have to use a specific Tamron 1.4 extender for this to work, namely this one.

Tamron makes several 1.4 extenders. The one you want is the black, non-pro version. This little teleconverter does not pass all of the lens data back to the camera body. Most notably, it omits the part about a teleconverter being attached, so your camera body still thinks that the lens is operating at f/3.5 to f/5.6 and so attempts autofocus. Notice I said "attempts". Whether it is successful or not, depends on the amount of light available and the amount of contrast visible on your subject. Autofocus is also slow, so this trick works for getting extra distance, but does not work very well for moving targets like birds in flight. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't (lack of light or contrast) its frustrating. Here's some tricks I've found to make this combination work better.

1. This trick works better on older camera bodies, such as the Digital Rebel or the Canon 10D. It still works with newer bodies like the 20D, 30D, and 40D, but not as well.


2. Use only the center AF point.


3. Focus on the highest contrast portion of the subject. Sometimes you may want to focus on the edge of the subject, right at the transition between the edge of the subject and the background as this area may have more contrast.


4. Use this trick to make far away birds appear larger in the frame.


5. Do not use for action shots like birds in flight.


6. Set your aperture to f/8 or smaller (f/10, f/11) to maintain sharpness and get the correct exposure.


7. If you use this trick with a flash in E-TTL mode the image will not be correctly exposed, because the lens data sent to the flash will be wrong. Use with flash in manual mode or dial in flash exposure compensation after taking some test shots.


8. Set your camera to one shot mode so you can tell if the camera locked on to the subject or is endlessly hunting due to lack of light or contrast for this combination.

I ran into someone at Green Cay on Friday. He was using a Tamron 1.4 extender that gave him auto focus with his Canon 400mm f/5.6 L lens. I think Kenko will also allow the auto focus to work. If you were to buy one, would you go with Tamron or Kenko?

You can use the Tamron 1.4x extender to get auto focus with the Canon 400 f/5.6 L lens and the Canon 100-400 f/3.5 - 5.6 IS L lens under certain conditions.

These conditions are:

1. It has to be a sunny day, and your subject needs to be well lit with a lot of contrast. (i.e. Red Shouldered Hawks have lots of contrast, but Snail Kites don't).


2. Autofocus will be slower than normal.


3. AI Servo will "hunt" to find its target more than usual.


4. Even though your camera will display that your aperture is set to f/5.6, in reality your exposure is being taken at f/8.

Although the trick works with a few teleconverters by Tamron, Kenko, and others; tests by users on internet forums like DPReview.com indicated that the Tamron performed better than the other brands. For this trick to work, you'll need to buy the inexpensive, "non-pro" version of the teleconverters.

Note you can also fool the camera when using a Canon or Pro teleconverter by taping the last three pins of the connector between the converter and the lens. However, the performance is much slower than the Tamron.

Labels: Reader Mail, Technique, Teleconverters

I took several pictures for HDR and Photomatix and I was wondering... Can you possibly tell me the basic steps you use? I have never really played with it, but now I am really excited about a few of these images.

I've wanted to write an HDR tutorial for some time, but I have so little time these days. Here's a roundup of a bunch of HDR tutorials. I've read them all and pick and choose methods that work best for a particular image.

http://tutorialblog.org/hdr-tutorials-roundup/

I currently use a 19 inch Viewsonic CRT. I am looking at the Dell 24 inch widescreen Ultrasharp LCD. What are you using and what are your thoughts on the Dell?

Dell's Ultrasharp line of monitors is very good and are usually manufactured by the same people that make the Apple Cinema displays. The Dell 24" display is a very good monitor. Apple displays look nice and they are usually the recommended monitor; but the Dell ones are just as good and for a lot less money. They also have more manual controls for calibration.

I use a Dell Ultrasharp 20" widescreen Flat Panel Display. I like it a lot. It also calibrates nicely, that is before I got Windows Vista. They haven't updated the calibration software to work with Vista just yet, so my monitor is uncalibrated. I prefer using a single widescreen monitor instead of 2 separate monitors.

I'm looking for a lens to take to Las Vegas along with my 28-135mm lens. I also want it to fill a gap in my lens collection. What do you think of the Sigma 17-70mm macro? Any other suggestions? I need a macro lens and a wide angle. A small mid range zoom is also needed.

If you want a macro lens, save your money for a true macro lens. The Sigma zooms that say macro are not true macro lenses. Now the Sigma 17-70mm is an okay lens. From what I've read, you need to stop it down to f/8 to get the best results; otherwise it may be a bit soft. Here are my choices for lenses at the moment, although I've not really used many of them yet:

Wide Angle: Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-45. A good cheaper alternative would be the Tokina 12-24mm f/4-5.6.
Macro: Sigma 150mm f/2.8 Macro. You can't beat the price / performance.
Medium Telephoto: Canon 70-200mm f/4 (non-IS). Again you can't beat the price / performance.

My next lens will probably be the Canon 85mm f/1.8 for portraits. For Las Vegas, I'd also bring the 50mm f/1.8. It will be great for low light shot without a flash. Just bump up your ISO.

I have a Sandisk 1.0GB compact flash card in my Canon S500. Would it make a difference to the speed of the shots if I upgraded to a faster card, perhaps the Sandisk Ultra II 2.0GB? Would this difference be noticeable?

The answer is yes, but it will not solve your problem with the S500; and here's why...

Your S500 can probably write data faster than a standard Sandisk Compact Flash card can handle, but not much faster. The speed gain will be negligible with this camera. Your camera also has a buffer of somewhere around 2 or 3 frames where the pictures are stored before they are written to the card. So unless you are taking more then 2 or 3 consecutive shots in a row, you won't notice the speed at which that data is written to the card. The only time you may even notice any difference is if you are using the camera's video function. In that mode the camera continually writes to the card and the extra speed may give you smoother video in some circumstances.

However this is not the "slowness" you are encountering with the S500. The perception of slowness has to do with the S500's shutter lag. That is the time between the moment you press the shutter button and the time the actual picture is taken. Like most point and shoot digital cameras, the S500 uses a traditional CCD sensor. This is the same type of sensor that is found in your video camera, and it allows you to get a live preview on your camera's LCD window. The disadvantage of this is that when you press the shutter button to take a picture, the camera turns off the CCD sensor momentarily to reset it for the proper exposure to take the picture, and then resets it again to display the live preview. All this resetting takes time with a traditional CCD sensor and that translates into shutter lag.

The digital SLRs advantage is that first of all they don't use a traditional CCD sensor. They use CCD that specifically designed for photography and not video, or they use a CMOS type sensor. The first thing you'll notice about an SLR is that there is no live preview on the LCD screen. It's simply not designed to do that. SLR's use a traditional mechanical shutter to take the picture, so the sensor is either exposed to light or not exposed to light. This means no resets in between and very little shutter lag as compared to the point and shoot cameras. The lag between the time the button is pressed and the picture is taken is very short, so the camera seems to react "faster" and you are more likely to get the shot you intended to get. Digital SLRs also have larger buffers, so you can take a lot more pictures consecutively, especially in JPG mode before the camera slows down due to the write speed of your memory card.

The differences can be summed up this way. A point and shoot digital camera feels like a boat. You can't stop a boat immediately, it takes time. A digital SLR is feels more like a car. You can stop a car relatively fast. There's still some delay between the time the brake is applied and the actual time the car stops, but it’s a lot faster than stopping a boat.

I just wandered across your site while searching for photography destinations in the South Florida area. I'm a Miami resident who recently found himself intrigued by nature photography. I have a 10 day vacation coming up, and would appreciate any suggestions for photography destinations within 100 miles or so of the Miami / Ft. Lauderdale area. My gear list might help, in terms of letting you know what sort of equipment I'll be carrying. I'll be shooting a 20D with a 17-40mm f/4 USM L, a 50mm f/1.8, a 100mm f/2.8 macro, and a 70-300 f/4 - 5.6 USM DO IS.

Thank you for writing. As you can see, most of my images are of birds, because they are abundant around South Florida. You'll find many of the nature photographers in South Florida concentrate on birds as their main subject. If you decide to pursue nature photography seriously, a 400mm lens is about the minimum that you would need to effectively capture images of birds. Of course there are other subject matters and it seems that you are well equipped to handle macro and wide angle landscapes.

With only 300mm, you'll need to get fairly close to your subjects, and there are two places in South Florida that you can do that. The first is Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park, and the second is the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach. Both places allow you to get fairly close to your subjects. Aside from those places, you can always practice at a zoo. The Wings of Asia exhibit at Miami Metrozoo lets you get pretty close to your subjects. Flamingo Gardens has an aviary with many native birds from South Florida. Butterfly World in Coconut Creek, lets you get pretty close to many smaller birds and butterflies.

I hope that helps you find some good destinations for your vacation and bring home some fantastic photos.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Reader Mail, Technique

Outstanding macro images! I think the ring light works really well. I may need to get one. Superb depth of field (DOF) on the images. What DOF do you find you use most on average for macro photography?


I usually shoot in Manual mode at f/16 and 1/250th of a second at ISO 400. I have to vary the flash output from 0 to -1 depending on how close I am to the subject. Sometimes I'll go as high as f/22 or bump down my ISO to 200 if there is a lot of light.

At that those apertures, no matter how much I've cleaned my sensor I usually spend at least 5 minutes in Photoshop cleaning up dust spots.

What do you think of a close-up lens? I have found some in 72mm and 77mm. Will it work with any of my lenses? I found a set with 1.5x, 2x, 4x, and 10x power.

I wasn't crazy about close-up lenses. I have a Canon 500D (58mm) which I bought for my 70-300mm lens. I didn't like it. Autofocus is out of the question, you need to go manual if you want to get stuff in focus. Also you lose infinity focus when you have a close-up lens attached, which is what drives the AF nuts.

I used the 500D for a couple of weeks then I put it away and saved up for the Sigma 150mm. I lent the 500D to my dad and he ended up buying extension tubes instead, and finally a real Macro lens. As you can see, he and I did very little Macro until we got our true macro lenses. Even with the 150mm, I only used it occasionally until I got a ring light, although with a diffuser, you can get away with using the 550/580ex flash.

Labels: Macro, Reader Mail, Technique

I have a few questions about Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) conversion. Exposure, Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Clarity, Vibrance, Curves; do you have a set a preference for these settings?

Alright here we go...

Exposure - You use this slider to set the correct exposure. For many images you can set this by holding down the ALT key and dragging the sliders left and right until you have no over exposed areas of the image (i.e. the "exposing to the right side of the histogram" method). So if you had overexposed areas you would drag the slider to the left while holding down the ALT key until you had no overexposed areas. If you had no overexposed areas to begin with, you would drag the slider to the right while holding down the ALT key until you had some overexposed areas. Then you would ease it back to the left just a little until you had no overexposed areas.

With that said, exposure like many settings is what you decide it to be. Some images look better overexposed, and some look better underexposed, so the method above may not work for every image. You can always just drag the exposure slider around until you see what you like. I find this second method especially useful when the images were taken on an overcast day, indoors, or under a lot of shade. In this case you don't worry about overexposed areas because that's what we're going to use the recovery slider for.

Recovery - Once you've set your exposure, you can use the recovery slider to recover the portions of the image that are still over exposed. You can also use the ALT key with this slider to see which parts of the image were recoverable, and which part of the image will remain overexposed. One thing about the recovery slider is that if you drag it too far to the right on some images the whites will turn a little bit gray or yellow. Sometimes it fits the image just fine, sometimes you have to back off on the recovery slider to keep them white. Use the recovery slider in conjunction with the Exposure slider to get the overall exposure that you want. Of course it’s best to get it right in camera, but if we can't always wait for perfect light or to have exposed an image correctly the first time.

On a technical note recovery uses similar techniques to creating a linear and normal conversion of the raw image and then combining them. It's just that now you can do it with one slider. I tend to treat recovery like the highlight slider in the highlights/shadows dialog in Photoshop.

Fill - Fill is like the shadows slider in the highlight/shadows dialog in Photoshop. Just like the shadows slider if you drag it to the right too much you will reveal the noise in the underexposed part of the image. One thing to remember is that fill or the shadows slider does not add noise; it only helps reveal the noise that was already there. Ok, how much. It's again subjective to your liking. It's really there to substitute as a fill flash. I find that most of the time I do not use the fill slider and still prefer to use the shadows slider in the highlight/shadows dialog, because I tend to want to make color corrections first before setting how much fill I want. When I do use fill, I use it sparingly from +20 on an ISO 100 image to as little as +3 on an ISO 400 image. I hate noise so I try to avoid revealing it if possible.

Blacks - is pretty much the same as the black slider in the levels dialog. Used with the ALT key, you can see which areas are going to become underexposed. Personally I leave blacks at zero most of the time and just use the levels dialog to set the black point after I've done any cropping, because I want to see the final cropped image first before setting the black point. When I do set the black point I'm pretty liberal. If its part of the background and it's supposed to be black, I'll keep dragging that slider to the right until it’s completely black. Setting your black point adds the most contrast to the image, and I like lots of contrast for daylight images.

Clarity - I use this slider to see if I can add enough contrast back to the image to save a soft image. I know many of you will open an image zoom to 100% and then use sharpening to see if a soft image is worth editing. Well, I do the same thing, except I use the clarity slider. It adds contrast to an image without actually performing sharpening, so that when you do apply sharpening there is a reduced chance that you will get a halo. Most of the time I leave this slider alone, unless the image is soft, then I'll play with it to see if I can make a soft image better. You can play with this slider along with the sharpening slider in the sharpening tab to see if your soft image is worth editing.

Vibrance - The most I've added is +20 I think. I use this instead to Saturation as I tend to prefer the results vibrance gives over normal saturation. Again use is subjective and depends on the image.

Curves - I leave curves alone and set it in Photoshop if I have to.
Sharpening - I also leave this at 0. I don't want to sharpen an image until I have cropped, cloned, and color corrected. I use Smart Sharpen at 50% with a radius of .8 for web, and somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 for printing. I save the PSD file unsharpened and always resize first and then resharpen for whatever I want to do. This keeps it flexible because what works for one printer does not work for another. I have to do less sharpening for the Epson 2200 than the laser printers at work. If there is a woman in the photograph always cut your sharpening in half. They'll greatly appreciate it.

Noise Luminosity - I leave this alone and use the noise reduction filter in Photoshop. Again I prefer to remove this noise after I've done cropping and color correction. I find Luminosity noise to be less objectionable and even film like in some respects.

Noise Color - I hate color noise. This is the noise you get from underexposing and image. I try to get rid of it whenever possible. So I set this slider to 50% as that gives me results similar to what BreezeBrowser produces. The one thing I really like about BreezeBrowser is how good it was at reducing color noise. I'll sometimes run the noise reduction filter in CS3 in addition to help get rid of color noise. If I can’t get rid of enough color noise, I throw out the image.

One thing about all of these new sliders is that you don't have to use them if you don't want to. You can get similar results by using the old dialogs in Photoshop. Of all the new sliders, Recovery is the one I use the most because I can now set exposure independently from recovering the highlights. The reason all of these new sliders are in Camera RAW is because they are required for Adobe Lightroom. Since Lightroom and CS3 now share the same RAW converter, CS3 users benefit from the new sliders. I have Lightroom, but I still use CS3 and Bridge 99% of the time. Lightroom is great if I want to take a picture now and print it immediately or "in about an hour". However if you're not under those time constraints CS3 is so much better.

Labels: Photoshop, Reader Mail, Technique, Workflow