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Photography comes from the Greek words phos (φως), meaning “light” and graphis (γραφις) meaning “stylus” or “pen”. Together this would translate to “drawing with light”. Though recently we have seen a rapid change from film-based cameras to digital cameras, light is still the fundamental source for photography.
In the early nineties I’ve bought my first SLR (Canon EOS-10) and a couple of lenses (EF28-70mm f/3.5-4.5 and an EF100-300 f/4.5 –5.6 USM mm) and as, thanks to my parents, I’ve always been in touch with nature I found my subjects there. As my main interest was in photographing plants and insects (maybe because they don’t tend to run away) I soon bought a Canon 100mm f/2.8macro, which is still in use.
However, costs of buying slide films and a huge battery consumption of the EOS-10 made me photograph less and less until finally the camera was only gathering dust…..Only the advances in digital SLRs brought me back to photography. Thinking it would be real money saver I bought my first digital SLR, the Canon EOS-D60, no more films to buy and process and rechargeable batteries….. How wrong I was, the EF100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 clearly showed that it lacked both in reach and image quality. For serious wildlife photography it was just no good. That’s what got me the must have L-lens fever, so out went the old lens and in came the EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM. I should not have done this, I really like the EF100-400 but it made me aware of some shortcomings in the EOS-D60 like poor focusing speed, low light performance and the inability to use autofocus with f/8 or higher (think about using extenders…). So, dropped the D60 for the EOS 1DMKII. Wow, this camera really rocks when compared to the D60. It’s a joy to work with, but it also made me want more. The 100-400mm is fine for large wildlife but if you want to shoot birds it’s just not long enough, especially as the 1DMKII has only a 1.3 crop factor compared to1.6 for the D60. After some serious research I decided to go for the EF500mm f/4.0 L IS USM. The extra reach of a 600mm lens would be welcome but this lens is just to heavy to carry around in the field.
As the EF500mm f/4.0 is still weighing in at 3870g it is not really suited for hand held photography, it is mainly used on a tripod with a Wimberley gimbal-type head.
Now it’s all so much fun that often my CF-cards didn’t last for a day in the field and as it turned out to be cheaper than a set of additional CF-cards I bought an Epson photofine P2000 enabling me to store 40-gig of pictures before I need to find a computer.
Gear in summary: - EOS 1DMKII dSLR
- EF17-40mm f/4 L USM
- EF100mm f2.8 USM macro
- EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM
- EF500mm f/4 L IS USM
- Tele-extenders 1.4x II and 2x II
- Speedlite 550EX Flash unit
- Manfrotto 055MF4 with a Wimberley WH101 gimbal-head
Digital post-processing
In contrast to most compact consumer cameras with a digital SLR you are able to shoot in RAW-mode enabling for example white balance and exposure correction. Though Adobe’s Camera-RAW does a fair job I’ve mainly used phase one’s C1 for this job.
Following the conversion from the raw format further post-processing is done using Adobe Photoshop, which with the CS version brought a lot of useful features for photographers like extended 16-bit color and a decent shadow/highlight correction tool.
From the start I used Neat-image as a noise removal tool but recently I bought the Picturecode’s Noise Ninja plug-in and I have been very impressed so far with its performance. Other plug-ins used are Focalblade and Focus magic both dealing with image sharpening.
Sure, it al turned out to be an expensive hobby, especially when you can buy a very good digital point-and-shoot camera for around 500 Euro but for me it’s worth it. Each new piece of kit also made me more aware of all the joys of nature and that’s often a once in a life experience.
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