John and all,

Perhaps "cheap" wasn't the best choice of words. Maybe I should have said "$3,000 or less". I should have also been a bit more precise with "point-and-shoot" and qualified that as a point-and-shoot used with a spotting scope or a point-and-shoot a with larger optical zoom, i.e., a zoom that's equivalent to a 400mm or better. I believe there's at least one Tweeters member who shoots with something like that and has a Flickr account, though I may be wrong, so I'll let them speak for themselves if they wish.

But my main points were that quality equipment doesn't necessarily guarantee quality photos and after a certain point, there's diminishing returns for money spent. Where that certain point is, however, depends on the skill of the photographer, what their objective happens to be, and what subjects they'll be shooting.

Regarding your challenge, I'm up for it, though as you say, it would be to demonstrate the incremental benefits of better gear. I'd use my 30D and 400mm, though with auto-focus on if I may ;) , which had an original retail value of about $2500. The question wouldn't be so much if the pro equipment got better photos, it probably will. It would be if the pro photos are worth the extra $7500, and the answer to that question will vary from person to person.

John Puschock
Wedgwood, Seattle
g_g_allin at hotmail.com
http://www.zbirdtours.com & http://www.birdtreks.com



Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:03:15 +0000
From: johntubbs at comcast.net
To: g_g_allin at hotmail.com
CC: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] camera gear



Hi John and everyone,



I agree generally with what John says here. One of my frustrations at times has been when people see a big lens and say, 'wow, with that equipment, you must get great pictures.' No...it's the combination of the equipment and the knowledge of the photographer. However, for bird photography, to say that a great photographer using 'cheap equipment' will get good bird pictures is absurd. Let me pick a good point and shoot camera without appropriate features and give it to Art Wolfe - and I will bet my house he will get virtually zero usable bird photographs unless the bird is sitting on his windowsill (or he's digiscoping with a highly capable scope and probably a scope mount). He certainly isn't going to get usable photos of a Golden Eagle 500 feet up a cliff in less-than-optimal light. Ditto with a hyperactive warbler 50 feet away in a thicket popping in and out of dappled light.



You certainly don't need the absolute top of the line equipment to do bird photography, but without a certain minimum set of capabilities, even excellent photographers are going to find themselves frustrated with the results because of the nature. Every photographer needs to learn how to use the capabilities of their equipment to get the most out of it, and the lack of appropriate knowledge isn't limited to people with high-end gear. I've run into photographers who went out and bought a Canon Rebel for general photography because they wanted a 'changeable lens' camera, and after talking to them it was clear they didn't even understand the difference between aperture and shutter priority, let alone some of the more advanced features of the gear. In general, my experience has been that people who spend in excess of a couple grand for camera equipment also spend a lot of time learning how to use it.



Reiterating what I said in the first post, camera equipment comes in a huge range of capabilities and related expense. With appropriately skilled photographers (which I emphasized in the first post), the better the equipment, the higher the percentage of good shots will be had. What is your personal tradeoff between capabilities and budget? How much time are you really going to spend doing photography and how does that factor in? Several years ago, I documented the first nesting of a species in central Oregon in 40 years. Even with a 16-meg camera back, shooting in RAW and applying skilled post-processing, it was all I could do to get usable images out of the marginal images captured. Anything less than the gear I had with me on that trip would have resulted in an interesting sighting report that would have been met with skepticism because it was a highly unexpected sighting by one person and would not have been documented photographically.



For anyone who wishes to dispute the incremental benefits of better gear, I would propose an in-the-field experiment. Let's take someone with an off-brand, non-autofocus 100-400mm slow zoom and an older 5 or 8 megapixel digital SLR, handheld, out to the Samish Flats while the Peregrines are still hunting Dunlin. Their counterpart will have a 500mm prime Canon with a 1.4X teleconverter fast autofocus lens on a tripod with a Wimberley head and a 16-megapixel camera back with four or eight frame multiple shot mode. We'll shoot in-flight images for a morning and do a comparison of the best ten or fifteen shots after editing and basic post-processing from each photographer at the end of the morning and compare results. I know who my money's on.





John Tubbs

johntubbs at comcast.net

www.tubbsphoto.com



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