We watched digital photography evolve for nearly a decade without embracing or ridiculing the new technology. We knew it was coming, but many problems needed to be solved. The price of digital high-end cameras had to come down. The quality produced by these new cameras needed to go up. Digital capture needed to be accepted by publishers. We love teaching photography, especially in the field, so our workshop clientele needed to switch from film to digital as well. Spending more time at the computer learning new skills wasn’t appealing either, but the adjustments that could easily be made to a digital image with Photoshop were exciting and the prints we could make at home on an Epson 2200 printer were most satisfying.
John bought his first digital camera in 2003 which was the Canon EOS 10D. Barbara had purchased digital cameras in previous years that included the Fuji S2 and recently the Nikon D70. Both of us found digital cameras to be easy to work and the few features such as white balance, histograms, and blinkies (highlight alert) not found on film cameras were easy to understand. We found digital cameras were really fun to use and enjoyed editing our take of raw digital images on the computer using a software program called PhotoMechanic. With each passing year, a larger percentage of our workshop participants were switching to digital too. About 25% shot digital in 2002, 35% in 2003, and 50% plus in 2004. We soon noticed that workshop participants who shot digital were more into the moment because they could shoot an image in the field and look at it immediately to see if changes should be made to composition, focus, or the background. Perhaps glare in a water scene suggested a polarizer should be used for the next shot. It became apparent digital shooters enjoyed shooting images more and they also learned quicker and were more willing to try new ideas.
It’s clear that we won’t be buying film cameras again. Digital cameras are shining brightly in our future. As I write this in November of 2004, my wife, Barbara and I are waiting for the recently announced top of the line cameras for the Nikon and Canon system to become available. (John got his new Canon EOS 1Ds Mark 2 in late December of 2004) We’ll each buy one of them, relegating our current digital camera bodies to a backup position. When the successor of these new cameras comes out, then we’ll sell the oldest digital camera body and get the new one. The camera it replaces will then become the back up body.
Let’s take a look at our reasons for going digital. Perhaps if you are still sitting on the fence between film and digital, this discussion will help make up your mind.
The price of a quality digital camera has come down considerably. A digital camera body that would have cost several thousand dollars just a few years ago can be obtained for less than $1500 or even $1000 now. As I write this, Canon has just announced the Canon 20D digital camera which features the latest image processor and 8.2 megapixels. The street price is $1500. Now that is a fair amount of money. But consider the cost savings in film and processing. Any serious amateur photographer could easily shoot 200 rolls of slide film a year. Film and processing cost would be at least $2000 so you have already saved $500 by going digital. Obviously, the more you shoot, the more the apparent savings by shooting digital when you compare the cost of film and processing.
Other than time, there is no real cost of shooting all the images you want. Anything that doesn’t come out well can easily be deleted. This encourages photographers to try numerous shots of tough subjects like birds in flight since bad images can quickly be deleted. When conducting our hummingbird workshops in British Columbia, we found the digital photographers who were in the majority shot far more images than film shooters because there was no real cost to shooting as many images as possible. Since you have no idea how the hummingbirds wings are positioned when you shoot with high-speed flash, our digital shooters quickly learned the more they shot, the more likely they might catch a fantastic pose! Some of our digital shooters shot more than 6000 digital images during the five-day workshop and then edited them down to the top 300-400 images. We don’t mean to imply there is no other cost to shooting digital. Obviously, storage media, computers, software, printers, ink, and paper cost plenty of money, but most people already have computers, printers, and other equipment to make a nice digital darkroom.
Digital photographers love the instant feedback and all the information digital cameras provide instantly. Photographers are quick to examine the picture viewer on the back of the camera and usually check the histogram to make sure the exposure is what they want. We believe digital photographers learn quicker, not because they are smarter than film shooters, but because they can see their mistakes in the field while the subject is still present and make corrections right away till they get it right. We remember when we taught ourselves to photograph hummingbirds in flight. It took us six weeks of trial and error shooting film until we had worked out the bugs and were consistently getting great images. If we had been shooting digital where we could see our mistakes immediately, the learning period could have been shortened to 10 days or less. Another place where we found digital shooters caught on quicker than film shooters is at the base of Laughing Whitefish Falls in northern Michigan. Often there is foam floating in circles at the base of the waterfalls. By using a short lens and shooting the pool with long exposures in the 6-8 seconds range, the foam creates attractive white circles and curves in the scene as it moves during the exposure. It is a unique shot that can be photographed, but you can’t see it when you look at it. Over the years, we have often tried to get film photographers to make this picture. Some just couldn’t see it and others would try a couple of frames and then go find a picture they can see. Invariably, they really liked the image when they finally saw it as a slide. The digital photographers could see what was happening right away, liked the results, and shot numerous compositions and varied their exposure times to get different effects. They worked the "foam trails" subject far better than film shooters ever had.
We never let the cost of film and processing stop us from shooting as much as we thought we needed to. When the shooting opportunities were superb, we always "burned" the film. During a wildebeest crossing of the Mara River, John has been known to shoot 36 shots in 1 minute or less. Then he had to stop to grab another camera or reload the camera he was shooting. A nice thing about digital is you can shoot far more images before reloading the camera. With John’s Canon 10D that produces a 6 megapixels raw file, he can get about 160 images on a 1 gig card. He also have a 4 gig micro drive that records about 640 images before he needed to replace the drive. That is like have 18 rolls of film loaded into a film camera at one time. This means he could go on a Kenya game drive and shoot the entire drive without ever having to reload the camera. Now that is convenience!
Of course, as the digital camera bodies become more powerful and the number of megapixels goes up, fewer images will fill the card. John’s new Canon EOS 1Ds Mark 2 has a 16.7 megapixels raw file, which is more than twice that of the Canon 10D. But, he bought the new Sandisk Extreme III card that holds 2 GB of data which means he can record 109 raw files on the card. Four GB and even 8GB cards are becoming available now to meet the demand for greater storage space.
We like the digital magnification factor that most digital cameras have. John’s Canon 10 D has a magnification factor of 1.6x which means his 180mm macro is now a 288mm macro that goes to 1.6 magnification without adding any accessories. His 500mm lens becomes an 800mm lens and his Canon 100-400mm zoom becomes a 160-640mm zoom which is a wonderful combination in Kenya. Of course, the digital camera doesn’t really magnify the image, it is really due to cropping a 35mm film frame down to a smaller format. But, it is still gratifying to see a big image in the viewfinder. Some of the top of the line digital cameras have sensors the size of a 35mm film frame so the lenses act like they normally do when shooting film. John’s new Canon EOS 1Ds Mark 2 digital camera has a full frame sensor so the magnification factor is lost. Actually it isn’t lost. Here’s why. John strives to get a large image size of the subject just like he did when shooting film. This puts more pixels on the subject making it possible for high quality enlargements. But, if he can’t get close enough for a big image of the subject, he will still shoot the image anyway, planning to crop the digital file later to get what he wants. Cropping a digital image only takes a moment with the computer.
It’s nice to use the magnification factor of most digital cameras to fill the frame-even if it is only cropping. It feels good to see a big image in the viewfinder and the quality is excellent for making prints and projecting the image. Having a 1.5x magnification factor in a digital camera turns a modest 300mm/f4 lens into a 450mm/f4 lens. You don’t lose any lens speed like you would with a teleconverter and the 300mm lens probably cost several thousand dollars less than a prime 500mm lens and it weighs a lot less too. Now everyone can easily afford and carry a "long" lens with them!
The ability to change the ISO setting on a digital camera to take into account changing light conditions is enormously useful. When photographing wildlife with Velvia 50, if the light became dim due to cloud cover, we had to go to another camera body that was loaded with a faster film to be able to keep up our shutter speed to insure a sharp photo. If we didn’t have another camera body available, then we had to rewind the Velvia 50 film, make a note on it so we would know where to advance the film when it was loaded again, and then load a higher speed film like Provia 400. Now with our digital cameras, we try to shoot at the lowest ISO setting on the camera which is ISO 100 to avoid the noise problem. But, if a dark cloud covers up the sun and the leopard appears, it’s easy to change to ISO 400 or even 800 so we can keep on shooting. This is a tremendous advantage over film cameras. On our 2004 Kenya safari, we found some hippos standing in wet mud at dusk. It was quite dark, but boosting the ISO on the digital camera to ISO 800 made it possible to make some adorable sharp images. In the past with film, we simply would not have had ISO 800 film so we wouldn’t try to photograph them.
We shoot our digital cameras using the raw mode because it gives us the greatest quality and makes it easy to adjust or optimize the image later with software. Changing the composition, removing small distractions, and adjusting the colors of the image are easy to do in Photoshop or other editing software. Because the colors are so easy to change, we don’t use warming filters like the 81B and 85C that we so frequently used with film. We can even shoot in the green light of a summer maple forest and take the green out with software. Rather than use a color enhancing filter to put more pink tones in a sunset image, we can easily do that later too. As a result, we no longer need to spend money on expensive filters and don’t have to carry them with us either. Anything that lightens our camera bag is a blessing. Some filters are still useful though. Polarizers are the one filter digital shooters still need. A graduated neutral density filter can be useful to lower contrast in a scene although high contrast scenes can be controlled with a digital camera by taking different exposures of the same scene and combining the images later. Another filter that some digital shooters might like is a closeup lens such as a Canon 500D for their macro work.
It has been suggested that digital creates more work than shooting film. Perhaps this is so if you spend most of your time trying to tweak decent images or make bad images into something that is useable. We are used to shooting Velvia 50 and learned to expose it quickly and precisely and knew what light it worked best in. Due to it’s slow speed, we employed techniques for getting the sharpest photos our film and equipment could deliver. We believed in editing our images before we ever took them so our percentage of keepers from a roll of film was fairly high-typically more than 25 keepers per roll and we are tough editors. It doesn’t take much for us to throw a slide away. It was our habits and working methods that delivered a quality image a high percentage of the time. We shoot digital cameras just like it was a film camera. Our percentage of keepers is still high, but not quite as high because we try more situations knowing some of them just won’t work-but hoping for the best anyway. When we shot film, we needed about a dozen perfect identical shots of everything we shot just so we could pass many on to our stock agencies and have a few for our files and programs too. Since we usually bracketed just a bit by 1/3 stop over and under what we thought the best exposure was, we shot a roll of film with only a few different compositions. This cost money and burned plenty of time that we would have preferred to use looking for a new way to photograph the subject or a new subject altogether. We never believed in using dupes in our photo business so that is why we always shot extra "in-camera" original dupes.
Digital has changed all that. We don’t bracket digital images at all and there is no reason to shoot the identical shot more than once as long as you know it’s sharp. Any great digital image can easily be copied as often as you need to and the duplicate file is identical to the original file. There is no loss of quality. This means we spend less time shooting the same shot, giving us more time to change the shot or look for new shots altogether.
When we shot slide film, we pitched any bad photos immediately. The good photos and the great photos were kept. Most of the good photos were sent to stock agencies and we kept the very best 10% for our own files. For example, when photographing hummingbirds in flight, let’s say we shot 200 slides. About 120 of the slides would be pitched because the wings were in a poor position, the wings were cut in the photo, the hummingbirds eyes weren’t in focus, a flash failed to fire, or a part of another hummingbird appeared in the frame too. Now we are down to 80 good to excellent images. About 60 of the good images were solid images where everything was sharp that should be sharp and the composition was fine and it was a solid shot. The excellent images had all that, but the wing position was especially beautiful and perhaps the facial expression was just a tad better than the rest. With film, we kept the very best for ourselves, the rest were sent to stock agencies. With digital, we only kept the very finest 20 images and everything else was deleted. Since it is easy to copy the digital file of the very best with no loss of quality and no expense, why bother keeping the merely good ones? We would always use the very best images anyway so the good ones were deleted right along with the bad images, keeping only the very best of each subject category. This saves a lot of storage space and helps avoid becoming buried with too many images to deal with. Since we work with fewer images now, it is much easier to find the very best ones.
In previous trips to Kenya, we came home with 300 rolls of film which had to be sorted and edited. That’s 10800 images that had to be examined. Of course, many of the photos are identical to each other since we needed many extras. That not only cost a lot of money to shoot that much film and process it, but it burned up countless hours. With digital we edited our images with PhotoMechanic software while in Kenya. By the time we got home, we had reduced the number of images down to only about 800 images, but they are all our very best. Not only was it much less expensive to shoot digital, but it saved us tons of time as well so we find shooting digital is a huge time saver.
We find it is quicker to label digital images than 35mm slides. When we wanted to label slides, we had to edit the slides first and put them in categories such as calypso orchid, yellowbell, cow parsnip, and butterfly weed which are all flowers. Then we had to count how many were in each category and type the information needed into a computer and print out the labels for each category. Then we had to attach the label to the slide mount. With digital, we batch processed the images and cut them down to the very best. Perhaps we were left with 6 calypso orchid photos. Then we labeled the digital files with the information about the calypso orchid that is needed such as what it is and where it was photographed and then told the software to attach the label to each of the digital files. It only took a moment and all of our calypso orchids were labeled forever! Now that is fast and convenient.
Although we are just learning how to optimize digital images, we already love what can be done. There is a lovely mountain near our home called Sawtelle Mountain that we had wanted to photograph for years when that really special light adorns it. Unfortunately, the Salt Lake City airport has a radar station on the very top so we never photographed it. Now with digital capture it would be easy to use Photoshop to remove this eyesore. We also don’t care for the viewing platform on the top right side of the Lower Falls in Yellowstone. Again, to make this waterfalls appear like the early explorers first saw it, it would be easy to remove the platform. When photographing hummingbirds with multiple flash, you are bound to get more than one catch light in the eye of the bird due to all the flashes. We normally get three catch lights since we are using three flashes on the front of the bird. But, three catch lights in the eye is unnatural. Again digital optimization comes to the rescue because it is easy to eliminate extra catch lights, leaving only one in the final image. One of our favorite poses of a male calliope hummingbird is marred because a single feather near the top of the beak is pointing straight up. Again, it was easy to remove this single distracting feather to improve the look of the bird. While leading an autumn photo tour of Yellowstone, Barbara noticed the indicator to unpredictable, but spectacular Beehive geyser was going off. The indicator is a tiny geyser next to Beehive that goes off 10-15 minutes before Beehive erupts. She got the group into position and it roared to life just as she had predicted. A gorgeous rainbow appeared in the mist that late afternoon and two bison were standing on the left side of the geyser. Unfortunately, a few people were standing on the boardwalk behind the geyser so humans appeared in the mist too. In only a matter of minutes on the computer, Barbara cloned the steam and removed the humans from the scene. It’s the nicest shot of Beehive geyser we have ever seen!
Another huge advantage of digital over Velvia for example is digital handles contrast much better than slide film. This extends the time when we can effectively shoot images during the day. We still don’t care for the harsh shadows caused by noon sun, but the shadows at 10 a.m or 5 PM are quite tolerable with digital capture. Even if the light isn’t high in contrast, the subject could be inherently high in contrast. A black and white skunk or a moose in a snowstorm comes to mind. With film, we had to expose for the highlights which are the white parts of the photo and let the dark areas go a bit underexposed. Digital handles a 5 stop range quite easily so now we can get plenty of detail in both the white and black areas of the subject. Plus, PHOTOSHOP offers some controls to solve the contrast problem too.
As many of you know who have attended our instructional slide programs over the past 25 years, we have learned how to expose slide film very quickly and with tremendous accuracy by using our camera on manual exposure, spot-metering something (usually the subject), and compensating for subject reflectance. The method was super quick and accurate, but it did take some effort to understand how your camera meter worked, how to compensate for subject reflectance, and it took practice learning to judge tones in the field. The beauty of digital photography is exposure is far easier-to the delight of everyone including us. Using matrix metering and automatic exposure modes such as aperture priority is a viable option with the digital camera. We tried it in Kenya in 2004 and matrix with aperture priority worked amazingly well, something that we did not find to be true when shooting film cameras loaded with Velvia.
Another thing we like about digital is the ease of converting a digital file into a high quality print in our home office. Sure, you could scan a slide and use software to remove dust, but it’s another step that requires an expensive scanner and software to handle it. With digital capture, we just pop the desired image up on the computer screen, make a few adjustments with Photoshop and send the file to the printer. In a matter of minutes, we have a gorgeous 13 x 19 inch print that is ready for framing. Making prints is a wonderful way to pass the time while a blizzard is raging outside our mountain home.
We love traveling with digital too. Imagine having to carry all of your camera gear and 300 rolls of film onto the plane when traveling to Kenya. We could do it, but we had to plan very carefully. With digital, it is easy to put the storage cards for the images in our shirt pocket and carry our camera bag on the plane. Most international flights limit you to one official carry-on bag and a purse or computer. So now we take a computer and our camera bag on the plane with no problems at all. It is much easier to travel as a digital photographer!
Digital isn’t without it’s problems though. While digital cameras are not really more complicated than a film camera, there is a learning curve. If you want to project the images, make prints, or even optimize the digital image with software, you’ll have to learn to transfer digital images to a computer and learn to work with them. There is a learning curve to using computers well and working on digital images will require learning about many computer programs and hardware accessories which will take some time. I’m lucky because my wife, Barbara, is a borderline computer nerd who rapidly picks up the skills she needs. She is a power user who is adept at making computers behave, at least most of the time.
Digital cameras are evolving quickly which means digital cameras become obsolete rather rapidly. To get the best images from digital cameras, you’ll have to stay up with the technology. Film cameras had an advantage because a great film like Velvia 50 could be loaded into a Canon EF camera body of the mid-seventies and still produce great results. To get the best quality with digital, you have to constantly upgrade the digital camera as they become more powerful and new technology allows them to create higher quality images. We think everyone will agree the new 12 and 16 megapixels cameras can produce higher quality images than the 3 megapixels cameras of a few years ago.
A huge problem with digital is the dust that is attracted to the sensor in the camera. Once dust is on the sensor, it appears on every single image unless you remove the dust ahead of time which is risky and not easy to do. This is one problem that needs to be solved now! Presently, we use a blower brush to blow dust off the sensor. We are also extremely careful to keep the inside of the camera body covered either with a lens attached or the body cap.
We love a well projected Velvia slide in a dark room. Using high quality projector lenses and a good screen made Velvia slides jump off the screen. Digital projectors (at least the ones we have seen) don’t quite deliver the quality of a properly projected Velvia slide. While the slide projector still wins the quality contest, digital projectors have been greatly improved and the price has come down considerably. We feel it’s only a matter of time before the quality of a projected digital image meets or exceeds a Velvia slide. However, the advantages of digital projection over slides is huge in other ways. We constantly had a problem with properly focusing slides that weren’t flat or warped in the slide mounts. Even slides mounted in different mounts caused problems. We tried using glass mounted slides, but ran into moisture problems, especially in humid regions. We never found a satisfactory way to keep a slide focused across the entire image. None of this is a problem with digital projectors. It is easy to keep every image perfectly sharp across the entire image! Digital projection has many other advantages too. An entire day of instructional images can be kept on a computer. No longer do we have to carry around seven slide trays. Advanced digital projectors have a way to easily control keystoning. The digital projector can be placed in front of the audience where it is easy for us to get to. No longer do we have to worry about participants heads or light fixtures blocking part of the projected image. It is easy to project multiple images at one time and a single digital projector offers a multitude of dissolve choices so a black screen between images is eliminated.
We are certain very high quality digital projectors that aren’t priced too much will be available soon. Companies are always looking to make money and please shareholders. In the past, only slide shooters really needed a Kodak projector. Now everyone who shoot digital cameras could use a digital projector. The market for digital projectors is huge. We are quite certain Canon, Epson, Panasonic, and other companies see this developing market and will make the quality products this market is looking for at a price point where most will be able to buy them.
Most digital cameras have a way to view the image you just made. Even with high end digital cameras, we find these viewers leave a lot to be desired. If there is much ambient light at all, it’s hard to really see the image. But, at least the image viewer is great for seeing the histogram.
Another problem we have found with digital cameras is they often don’t have low ISO speeds. Many of the Nikon’s that were being used in our hummingbird photo workshop lowest ISO was a fast ISO 200. We constantly had to move the flashes further back from the hummingbird so they could shoot since they didn’t want to shoot at f/32 or f/45 due to unsharpness problems caused by diffraction. If you want to blur the water in a river or waterfalls, it is harder to do so with ISO 200 as the lowest ISO on the camera. It would be most beneficial if digital cameras had an ISO 25 and ISO 50 setting.
