20d - vs. - 1d mark2 N (1 Viewer)

Just a further thought. It you look at the postings of "Anonymous Guy" you will see he mostly uses an 80-200/2.8 but has a small tent that he sets up in appropriate sites. He gets very close with the tecnique. Try this with the gear you've got and you'd be amazed at the quality of the 80-400 at 3 meters.Neil.

MarkCaunt said:

Im currently doing digiscoping and looking into SLR digital cameras and finding this and other threads very interesting.............
........ partic the African Harrier-Hawk. Has that been touched up much on Photoshop? How it compare to original? In my opinion it seems digiscoping is more about what you can do with Photoshop afterwards then the initial shot.

Thanks in advance, Mark
http://AngusBirding.homestead.com

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Hi Mark,
I'm pretty clueless with photoshop. All the pics I take are taken as Raw files with a small tagged on JPEG. I use Breezebrowser to convert the Raw files to tiffs (23.4mb @ 8 bit), then I simply crop, re-size & sharpen in photoshop. As you know all digital images need sharpened & shooting in Raw involves sharpening in photoshop. All the Gambia images were treated this way. A great many of the pictures I took involved a hand-held 500mm image-stabilised lens WITH a 1.4x convertor; admittedly I'm a bit on the large side but I find that I can get consistently good results when light levels are fair. In Scotland light is often at a premium as I'm sure you know all too well but handholding a big lens is still often productive.
The Verreaux's Eagle Owl pic was taken with a 500mm lens + 2x convertor + 1.4x convertor on a 1DmkII (1.3x cropping factor) > effective magnification of 10x2x1.4x1.3 => 36.4x @ 8.3megaPix. This obviously required a tripod & a high ISO setting (the owl was roosting in fairly dense shade) but produced a reasonable result which could have been made much better by some colour management in photoshop. If most of your images are for the website then an 8.3 megaPix image can be cropped quite significantly easily competing with digiscoped images.
I don't know if you have been to Loch of the Lowes Mark but if I you have then this might give you an idea of what to expect with digital SLR. The following image was taken with a 500mm IS lens + 2x convertor on a Canon 1D mk II resting on a beanbag from the closest window (to the Osprey eyrie) of the upstair hide. The first image is the uncropped image sized-down for ease of display, the second image is cropped & down-sized as for a reasonable web image. The third image is displayed as actual pixels @ 72pix/inch (ie displayed @ 100% but obviously heavily cropped).
The image is of an imm/female Marsh Harrier flying over the Osprey eyrie taken on 22nd May of this year- a short-lived but bizarre interaction between these two rare raptors!

Thanks Steve. That Marsh Harrier shot does help thanks and that was quite a set up for the Eagle Owl Picture. And the result speaks for it self! Awesome.
So i take it you have a very good tripod to be able to hold 500mm lens + 2x convertor + 1.4x convertor on a 1DmkII.
I have a fluid head manfratto for my Swarv scope. How would this bear up? What are peoples opinions on 393 Long Lens Tripod Head? I saw this on Andy Brights website.
http://www.digiscoped.com/manfrotto701RC2.html
Sorry if this is all bit off topic.
Thanks and all the best, Mark

Mark I use a Wimberley gimbal head on a Gitzo carbon fibre tripod (G1325) with a levelling base. When I go birding I mount my scope on this set-up. It takes a bit of getting used to & isn't too light (the Wimberley head is heavy) but the set-up is a good compromise for scope>switching to long lens mount & the Wimb. head is good for following flight/action shots. I could do with a lightewr set-up for foreign travel however.

birder said:

Hi there

Sorry but I can;t find Jim Neigers pics on the site - could you give a link to his name on the site please?

Thnanks

Kevin

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Some stuff to look at would include:

http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=37311
http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36698
http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=35434

There are plenty of other examples in the bird forum and the photo essays forum. These 3 links are for photo essays.

cheers,

Hi guys, I have been following the thread with interest as I have the 20D and was merely dreaming of getting the 1D. I am sure you are all aware of the new introduction - the new Canon EOS 5D. To summarise its features
1) lightweight, robust digital SLR
2) full-frame 12.8 Megapixel CMOS sensor uses Canon's EF lenses without a conversion factor.
3) 9-point AF system with 6 assist points,
4) 3.0 fps for up to 60 consecutive JPEG or 17 RAW frames in a burst.

Can any one can comment on the theoretical (doubt if anyone has practical experience at this point of time) value of this "mid range" machine to a birder in the context of the current discussion?

I'm not a Canon user but it would seem to me that a full frame DSLR is not targeted at nature photographers and 3 frames per second is not really any better than you get with the 20d. I get 3 frames per second with the Nikon D100 and I'm not happy with it. I want 8. For birds particularly, the chase for megapixels doesn't mean that much any more , what we want is reach and speed of focusing (light weight would be nice to ). Just my thoughts, Neil.

Neil said:

I'm not a Canon user but it would seem to me that a full frame DSLR is not targeted at nature photographers and 3 frames per second is not really any better than you get with the 20d. I get 3 frames per second with the Nikon D100 and I'm not happy with it. I want 8. For birds particularly, the chase for megapixels doesn't mean that much any more , what we want is reach and speed of focusing (light weight would be nice to ). Just my thoughts, Neil.

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I would echo Neil's thoughts on this. The 1D mkII is a much more robust camera with faster more accurate autofocus & whilst only 8.3 megapixels it has a cropping factor of 1.3x so that the pixel density is not far behind a 12 megapixel full frame. I think the new 5D has more to offer the landscape photographer than it does bird photography.
If Canon were to bring out a reduced size sensor 12 megapixel replacement for the 20D (1.6x "cropping" factor) I would certainly be interested.

Im about to buy a 20D which retail over here in a package for $1400. It comes with a tripod, bag, memory card, cleaning kit, a Canon 28-300 3.8-6.3 Auto focus Lens and a Canon 28-105mm Auto Focus Lens
Ie been reading this thread and there is some great advice and lots of knowledge contained within. Can anyone tell me how good these lenses will be for nature photography. Will I need a bigger lens, Im also venturing into the semi-pro field and have used a conventional camera (my trusted Minolta which earned me a few squids over the years) for years so digital is new to me. Id like to have a variety of lenses eventually when I have the money. I would like the 100-400mm Canon lens but you can also buy a huge Opteka for like $600 bucks. Are Opteka any good or would I be better just waiting longer and buy the much more expensive CANON EF 500MM F/4L IS USM
for $5600

birder said:

Thanks for that, Scott.

Please don;t mind my ignorance but are you saying that I can get a 48Mb unsharpened image from the EOS 1D MARK 2 N? How about the EOS20D?

Kevin

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If you save your 8MP image as an uncompressed tiff then you'll have around 24MB of data (8MP x 3 bytes per pixel).

However Alamy's guide does say that they'll accept files that have been upsampled with something like Genuine Fractals - so you can still use images that were originally (or have been cropped to) something smaller.