Photographic Equipment

All of the newer photos on this site were shot using a Canon EOS 1D Mark III camera, which is a professional, 10 megapixel digital SLR. However, many of the earlier photos were shot using the much more affordable Canon EOS 30D, an 8 megapixel consumer-grade camera which Canon has recently upgraded in the form of the 40D.

The nice thing about SLR cameras is that they accept interchangeable lenses, so you're not stuck with a single lens that may in time prove to be insufficient for the type of photography you want to do. And they're not too hard to use, as long as you keep them in "auto" mode, which effectively emulates the behavior of the cheaper "point-and-shoot" cameras. After using them in auto mode you can begin to experiment with the other modes until you begin to feel comfortable programming the camera. I do most of my work in aperture-priority mode; in this mode, the only thing I absolutely have to program is the aperture (which I typically set to the maximum for the lens I'm using, unless I need to increase the depth-of-field). Other optional settings which I sometimes fiddle with are the exposure compensation and ISO setting, though I only mess with these when light is scarce and I need to increase the shutter speed in order to mitigate the effects of hand-shake.

The above models all use CompactFlash memory cards; I keep 60 Gigabytes worth of memory cards with me at all times, and I've yet to run out of memory in the field. I shoot in RAW mode because it retains the most amount of information. RAW is especially useful for reducing noise (i.e., the "speckling" you see in areas of the image that should be smooth), since noise reduction during RAW conversion tends to be more effective than when applied to a converted JPEG.

I've used cards made by SanDisk, Lexar, PNY, and Transcend. So far, the only one that has failed was the Lexar (which was also the most expensive card, by far) -- but they replaced it, and I've had no problems since. I have a mix of 1 GB, 2 GB, and 8 GB cards, for a total of 60 GB. I keep these in my vest pocket (in a ziplock back for protection from moisture), so they're always ready when I need to swap out a card. I have my Canon 1D Mark III set up to record RAW images to the CF card and JPEG-L "previews" to a separate Secure Digital (SD) card; the "previews" on the SD card are only used to verify after each shot that I've got the expore set right; I delete all files from the SD card whenever I swap in a fresh CF card, since the SD files are only for individual image review during shooting. The JPEG previews are useful because the on-camera preview from the RAW files is terrible.

An important selling point of the Canon 30D and the Canon 1D Mark III cameras is the battery life -- although I bought a backup battery for my 30D, I've never needed it, even after spending an entire day in the field, and so far I've never run out of juice on my Mark III either. Compared to the battery in my old Nikon D50, the Canon's battery never seems to run out of juice...

This lens has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the sharpest telephoto lenses ever made. I can personally attest to the sharpness of this lens, which I believe derives from the use of fewer optical elements in its construction than most other long telephoto lenses (7 in this lens, versus 17 for the larger, f/4.0 lens shown below). Fewer optical elements result in fewer lens-to-lens and lens-to-air transitions and therefore fewer opportunities for light scatter, as well as opportunities for mis-alignment at the factory. Renowned bird photographer Arthur Morris swears by this lens, especially for birds in flight and in bright sunlight, and it has become extremely popular as a result. Not only is the lens optically suberb, but it's also small and lightweight.

The image stabilization feature sported by this lens definitely helps to reduce the effects of hand shake when I use this lens without a tripod. However, on sunny days I usually turn it off altogether, since the bright sunlight allows me to use extremely high shutter speeds, so that hand tremors tend not to be an issue. Although the lens looks somewhat formidable in the above photo, it is remarkably light -- just 4 lbs, which is less than the 300mm f/2.8L Canon lens. The lightness is due to the use of diffractive optics (DO), a relatively new technology which allows longer focal lengths in a shorter (and lighter) package. Because of its lightness I almost never use a tripod with this lens except when operating it with the 2x teleconverter (see the discussion of teleconverters below). Most recently I've been using it almost exclusively with the 1.4x teleconverter, for an effective focal length of 560mm at f/5.6; in this configuration I still hold the lens in my hand rather than using a tripod, and find that it works very well.

Since my new Canon 1D Mark III is a "pro" body, I am now able to use the 2x teleconverter with this lens and still retain autofocus capability, resulting in an AF 800mm lens! This is an amazing focal length for a lightweight, handheld setup. Unfortunately, my 2x TC is not very sharp, so I don't currently use that setup very often.

This lens is brutally heavy. Hiking several miles with this thing slung over my shoulder can be difficult. Nevertheless, for photographing tiny warblers flitting around in the forest canopy, there is no other viable solution than a big telephoto lens like this one. Note that Canon does not make an 800mm lens, though one has been announced for release this coming spring. The closest thing is the Canon EF 600mm f/4.0 IS USM, which is several thousand dollars more than the Sigma 800mm, and requires a teleconverter to achieve a similar focal length (840mm at f/5.6). The Sigmonster's build quality is quite good, though I did have to send it in for service once, due to a loose mounting ring. Also, this lens does not have image stabilization, which can be a significant problem in windy conditions (keep in mind that the longer the focal length, the worse a lens will perform in high wind!).

This is an 100-300mm zoom lens with Canon's USM ("Ultrasonic Motor") technology. The USM lenses supposedly have higher quality glass than non-USM (Canon) lenses, and since the lens' auto-focusing motor is built into the lens (rather than using the camera's focusing motor), focusing tends to be very quick and accurate. In my older Nikon setup (a Nikon D50 camera and Nikkor 80-400mm zoom lens), I found that auto-focusing could be extremely painful due to the slowness of the camera's focusing motor. My newer (Canon and Sigma) lenses all focus very fast by comparison. Note that the zoom lens shown above does not have image stabilization; image-stabilized zooms are available but are more expensive, and I've gotten some excellent photos through this lens despite the lack of image stabilization, and without a tripod.

This 300mm zoom is a relatively cheap one -- it goes for about $280 or so. Canon has another model which is rather more attractive: the 28-300mm f/4L IS USM zoom. I've yet to try out this latter beast, but it does appear quite useful, since at the 28mm range it acts as a wide-angle lens (which should be useful for landscapes) and it has both built-in Image Stabiliation (IS) and a 2.5-foot close-focusing distance, which might be useful for photographing flowers and butterflies. Too bad it costs about $1200 (US)! They also have a nice 300mm DO zoom lens, which appears to be extremely compact.

During my early days of bird photography I made the mistake of relying too heavily on teleconverters. In particular, I used a very cheap teleconverter attached to a 400mm zoom lens, which was nearly always zoomed out to 400mm, for a total effective focal length of 800mm. The quality was very poor. The problem was that zooms tend not to be the sharpest lenses, and cheap teleconverters tend not to be sharp either.

I now keep two teleconverters with me at all times: the Canon Extender EF 1.4x II, and the Canon Extender EF 2x II, both top-of-the-line Canon products. The 1.4x applies a factor of 1.4 to both the focal length and the aperture, so that (for example) a 400mm f/4.0 lens becomes a 560mm f/5.6 lens. And similarly for the 2x.

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Both TC's degrade the image quality, though depending on the scene it may be harder or easier to actually see the degradation without specifically looking for it. I have used the 1.4x attached to the 400mm f/4.0 lens for an effective 540mm f/5.6, hand-held, with very acceptable results when image-stabilized, though the image is noticeably soft -- not unpleasantly so, but just enough that you would notice if you were to compare the image to others without the TC.

UPDATE: I recently replaced my 1.4x TC with another "identical" unit of the same model, and the results have been excellent; there is apparently much variation between units, even brand new units. In any event, the 1.4x TC is now "permanently" attached to my 400mm DO lens, and I am very satisfied with this setup. My 2x still degrades the image quality too much, however, so I don't use it. (Maybe I need to have it re-calibrated?)

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The 2x TC has come in handy in some special circumstances. When photographing an American Kestrel at the top of an extremely tall utility pole in Raleigh, I stacked the 1.4x and 2x teleconverters onto my 800mm Sigmonster lens, for an effective focal length of 2240mm (!) at f/11. No current DSLR will auto-focus at f/11, so I had to manually focus in this configuration, and many of the shots were too blurry to keep. A few were reasonably sharp, however (after digital processing on the computer), as you can see here.

Until very recently, I used no flash whatsoever -- I relied entirely on natural lighting from the sun. This severely limited my opportunities for bird photography, since birds are often encountered in shady places like forests. Then I found that Art Morris relies heavily on flash when photographing songbirds and shorebirds. Even when there is ample sunlight, pro bird photographers often utilize some flash to lighten up the shadows (called "fill flash").

I now keep an external flash unit with me at all times -- the Canon Speedlight 580 EX II. This is a ridiculously over-priced unit, in my opinion (though it has recently come down in proce to about $350US), but produces powerful flash output, and has been highly recommended by other photographers. When using this unit I always attach a Better Beamer flash extender, which utilizes a fresnel magnifying lens to extend the range of the flash, which both increases my flash range and also saves battery power.

Regarding battery power, it is important to note that outdoor flash photography eats batteries at an insane rate. Whenever I use my flash unit (which is about 99% of the time) I always attach an external battery pack ($140 US) to augment the unit's internal juice -- a total of 12 AA-sized batteries usually lasts all day but needs to be recharged overnight to renew power for the next shoot. Without an external power supply, two bad things happen: (1) the batteries in the flash unit die quickly, and, more importantly (2) the recharge-time between shots can become quite long, so that you have to wait 30 seconds or more between shots; this is simply too long for bird photography.

I use 12 @ 2900-mAh AA batteries manufactured by Impact (purchased at Adorama) and 4 @ 2500-mAh batteries manufactured by Sony (purchased through Amazon). When buying rechargeable batteries for flash units you need to be careful to get a package which includes a high-quality charger; cheaper chargers can overcharge your batteries and reduce their lifespan.

Using an external flash is an enormous pain. The flash unit, fresnel extender, and external battery pack add weight to the lens setup (sometimes causing the lens to inadvertently flop over in the mounting ring if not properly secured), and often catches on branches and foliage when walking through the woods with the setup slung over my shoulder. Getting the amount of flash just right can also be an enormous pain. When using flash I switch between Aperture-Priority mode (in which case the flash unit is merely providing "fill flash" to lighten up the shadows) and Manual Mode (in which case I'm using the flash as the primary light source). Canon's flash logic makes manual mode flash photography somewhat manageable, however, by automatically adjusting the flash output so as to achieve a desired exposure, so that "manual" mode isn't quite as "manual" as it sounds (a good thing).

One trick I've learned with my new EOS 1D Mark III is to not use the "high-speed synch" feature on my Speedlight 580EX II flash unit, since (by some reports) that mode on the pro bodies requires more manual intervention in setting the exposure level correctly. For bird photography, since I'm constantly switching between subjects, some of whom are backlit while others are not, the high-speed synch mode is just too laborious on the 1D body. Fortunately, the 1D Mark III has a max synch speed (in normal mode) of 1/300 sec, which has been fast enough for me.

Without the high-speed synch set, I've just needed to pay more attention to the blinking of the shutter speed in the viewfinder --- a blinking "300" indicates possible over-exposure. In these cases I either stop down from f/8 to f/11, or (if I'm already at f/11) reduce the ISO speed from 400 by several stops until the "300" stops blinking. So far I've been totally happy with a maximum shutter speed of 300; indeed, in cases where the bird's movement exceeded this shutter speed, I've found that the flash speed was sufficient to freeze (or nearly freeze) the birds' movement, with only a very subtle "movement shadow" evident in the resulting image from the slower shutter speed.

For birds at relatively large distances I've had some luck in using astronomical (!) telescopes to act as cheap telescopic lenses. I started out using the Celestron C-5 (the white telescope shown below), which is of the Schmidt-Cassegrain design. This is an amazing instrument, though somewhat fragile. I used my C-5 to observe an eagle nest outside Washington, DC for 11 years; except for the frequent collimation required to keep the instrument in pristine working condition, this unit served my needs very well over those years.

In what I call the "digiscoping mode" this telescope can be used for primitive long-range photography by simply placing the camera lens up to the eyepiece of the telescope (shown at left in the illustration below) and simply capturing the image that one would normally see if one were to look into the telescope's eyepiece.

This is not a sharp photo. Part of the reason for this is that the nest was about four football-field lengths away from where I was standing! Another problem derives from the use of "digiscoping" --- i.e., placing the camera's lens up to the telescope's eyepiece and photographing the image manually. A far better method is to attach the camera directly to the telescope's optical tube assembly via a t-adapter (shown below):

With these three items---the Celestron C-5 (about $600 new), the C-5's t-adapter (about $50), and a t-ring for your particular camera model (about $15), you can obtain pretty amazing photos, given the relatively modest outlay of cash required. The reason this works better in practice than standard "digiscoping" is that the light has far less glass to travel through in reaching the camera's CCD sensor, since both the telescope's diagonal/eyepiece assembly and the camera's lens have been removed entirely. Less glass translates into straighter light rays (statistically speaking) and thus sharper images.

An even better setup is one utilizing the Orion 150mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope (see below), which currently sells for about the same price as the smaller C-5 ($600 direct from Orion). Whereas the C-5 has a 5-inch objective lens diameter, the Orion is 6 inches, letting in far more light. Also, whereas the C-5 has a 1200mm focal length, the Orion is 1800mm. Coupled with a 1.5x crop-factor digital camera, the effective focal length is 2700mm (!).

Of course a telescopic lens of this sort can't (normally) be held in the hand; I mount mine on a Davis & Sanford (now manufactured by Tiffin) telescope tripod, which I believe fetches $200 or more (I got mine years ago for about $120, as I recall). The image below shows the Orion attached to my DLSR and mounted on the Tiffin tripod; I was using it that day to shoot Willets and Marbled Godwits along the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

A Canon t-ring ($15) is all that is needed to attach the 30D to this telescope. An example image through this setup is shown below; note that this bird was about 40 or 50 feet from the camera; through a 400mm lens this bird would have appeared as little more than a tiny, blue blob in the distance.

For flower photography I use a Sigma 50mm macro lens, which runs a bit over $200. The advantage of this lens is that you can photograph objects that are only millimeters away from the front of the lens. This allows you to capture minute details such as individual pollen grains or dewdrops on a flower.

The Macbook Pro comes with ample image-processing software pre-installed, so that for most of my photographic needs, no additional software is required. Though I've installed Photoshop on my laptop I rarely use it, opting instead to rely on the handy image manipulation utilities provided with Mac OS X.

UPDATE: Now that I'm shooting everything in RAW, the built-in Macintosh software ("Preview") no longer serves my needs, unfortunately. What I've been doing most recently is using Canon's free "DPP" software (included on CD-ROM with the camera) to convert the 12 Mb RAW file into a 60 Mb 16-bit TIFF file that can be processed by Photoshop. I've had excellent luck in processing my photos in this way. After processing them in Photoshop Elements for Mac, I do a screen-capture of the Photoshop image (via Shift-Cmd-4 and a paste into Preview) to a separate TIFF file, then convert the TIFF files to JPEG using the "sips" program built into Mac OS X. The temporary 60 Mb TIFF file can be deleted after the JPEG file is generated, so its size isn't an issue. I sometimes add a final tweak to the TIFF file using Mac OS X's "Preview" program, though I try to avoid this. All-in-all, my workflow is now a tiny bit slower than before, but the improvement in image quality is well worth it.