Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Over 9000 images were submitted to Audubon Magazine’s 2015 photography contest (all birds, of course), and the judges have chosen the top 100, which you can see here. All of them are superb. I’ve selected only ten below, but you really should go over, take a bit of time, and look at them all. I didn’t realize that they had chosen the winners, but none of the ones I liked below won. I’ll put two of the winners at the bottom.
Merlin/Amateur Category. Photo: Carl Woo, Audubon Photography AwardsPeregrine Falcon/Amateur Category. Photo: Carl Woo, Audubon Photography AwardsGyrfalcoln and rock pigeon/Amateur Category. Photo: Harry Colquhoun, Audubon Photography AwardsPyrrhuloxia/Amateur category. Photo: Joseph Messina, Audubon Photography Awards.White-breasted Nuthatch/Amateur Category. Photo: Kenneth Helar, Audubon Photography AwardsMagnificent Frigatebird/Professional Category. Photo: Keith Ellenbogen, Audubon Photography AwardsPileated Woodpecker/Amateur Category. Photo: Linda Cullivan/Audubon Photography AwardsGreen Heron/Amateur Category. Photo: Peggy Coleman/Audubon Photography AwardsWood Duck/Amateur Category. Photo: Peter Brannon, Audubon Photography AwardsSnowy Owl/Amateur Category. Photo: Loi Nguyen, Audubon Photography Awards
TWO WINNERS I LIKE:
Laughing Gull, Double-crested Cormorant, Royal Tern. Photo: Constance Mier/Audubon Photography AwardsSpecies: Laughing Gull, Double-crested Cormorant, Royal Tern Where: Biscayne Bay Aquatic
Preserve, near Miami, FL Camera: Sony a700 with a Sony F4-5.6/70-400 G SSM lens; 1/2500 second at f/5.6; ISO 320SONY DSCBlack Skimmer. Photo: Tim Timmis/Audubon Photography AwardsSpecies: Black Skimmer Where: Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, near Port Bolivar, TX Camera: Canon 1DX with a Canon 500mm f4 IS II lens and a Canon 1.4X III teleconverter; 1/500 second at f/8; ISO 1600
I was encouraged to enter, but I knew I’d have no chance of winning. I think it cost something, and I’m cheap that way — no chance, no money.
I agree, these are “once-in-a-lifetime” shots. (I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that.) There are so many talented amateurs and professionals with excellent modern gear and technique, each taking many thousands of shots a year, all over the world, and sharing them. The incremental cost of taking a photo is nearly zero. The incremental cost of sharing a photo is nearly zero.
If I had a time machine, I’d take my laptop (15″ Retina MacBook Pro) back to The National Geographic office in 1995 to pitch these photos, and a lot of other things, until the battery dies.
In 1995…that MacBook Pro could well have been the most powerful computer in existence. Might be able to do a wee few more interesting things than use it as a photo album…assuming “they” don’t “appropriate” it….
I meant to reply, but it entered as a new comment. See below.
“a lot of luck involved”
Well, with wild animals there is bound to be an element of luck involved but the implication (if it was intended) that these photographers just got lucky is, I think, rather unfair. Virtually all of these pictures will have required not just fancy kit but also a good deal of photographic skill and excellent ‘field craft’. They fully merit the honour of being selected for Audubon Magazine’s top 100 and selected from those 100 for display by Jerry.
I agree that many of Stephen’s pictures would sit quite happily in this company but I am pretty sure that his pictures are not just down to luck either. The fact that it is easy and cheap with digital cameras to take a large number of pictures does not mean that you can just fire off a thousand or so shots and expect that one or two of them will be winners.
However, nabbing the exact instant of, for instance, that green heron is pure luck. There’s no way a human could time such a thing. My guess is, unless that photographer was insanely lucky, they tried for that shot hundreds or thousands of times (and sent the results to the computer’s recycle bin) before getting that image.*
Hence my comment about them being once-in-a-lifetime shots.
The rest of my comment “also being out there, day after day, of course” is meant to indicate that fortune favors the bold (and the prepared and well-placed). So, yes, of course, lots of hard work and field smarts to place yourself in the right place at the right time.
(* I am a pretty well experienced outdoor photographer, many 10s of thousands of shots — I started in the days before digital, before motor-drives, and I shot all-manual, all the time, I didn’t even use a light meter).
I disagree to an extent. I think there is undeniably a certain amount of chance or luck at play in photographing un-staged things like wildlife. And that yes, firing off a 1000 shots does indeed significantly increase your chances of capturing a winning shot. And that amateurs on occasion luck upon winning shots that would make a pro proud to have captured. It’s just much rarer than pros doing so.
However, it is also true that skill and talent are also a big factor. The old adage, “luck favors those who come prepared,” definitely applies here.
I think we are all broadly in agreement. I note that two of the photos in the amateur category are by the same person, Carl Woo. If he’d won the lottery twice I’d agree he is a very lucky man, but taking two top quality pictures, selected amongst the best 100 entries in the AM competition definitely reflects some considerable talent, I think.
Woo (W)hoo(?)!
Certainly motor drive is significant in capturing the critical moment. My camera, the Panasonic GH3 is pretty average and can shoot 7 frames per second at high resolution. Some do better. If I see a bird approaching some noms, I can shoot 50 frames to cover the whole event. I’ve tried this several times and still find that, without having made all the other judgements involved such as background, angle, and light, etc. I’m not likely to get much better than so-so.
I don’t try this often though since my main interest is video.
I think the most important camera feature in such a situation isn’t frames/sec, but an accurate and responsive auto focus.
Yes indeed. Theoretically, both great auto focus and frames per second can make capturing a one in a million shot one in a thousand.
The Canon 7D was created as their “prosumer” high-performance camera that shoots 8 frames per second. At the time, the 5D Mark II was the go-to all-around camera, legendary amongst wedding photographers; its frame rate was just barely under half that of the 7D, at 3.9 FPS.
Canon released the new version of the 5D, the 5D Mark III, as an upgrade for the same market segment. It got a modest boost in frame rate, to 6 FPS, still significantly less than the 7D’s 8 FPS…but it also got the autofocus system from the flagship model, the 1DX. And the 5DIII, even with its slower frame rate, stomps all over the 7D for action photography.
…and then, of course, Canon revised the 7D with the 7D Mark II, and the 7DII shoots 10 FPS with the new autofocus system, so that’s now the preferred action camera.
But, yes. Even a camera that shoots half again as many frames per second can’t compare to one with a superior autofocus system.
Cheers,
b&
As a videographer, I was very tempted to get a 7D or a 5D Mark II. These two cameras took the independent film world by storm. The reason I ended up with a GH3 was it provides comparable image quality yet is smaller and is nearly half the weight. It also costs about a third of the Mark III.
The Sony mirrorless full frame A7S is a nice video machine as well. Expensive though. I’ve been mulling over getting one of the mirrorless full frames to replace my NEX-7.
Video scares the shit out of me. I have enough trouble with stills…and now I’ve got to deal with a couple dozen of them every single second!? And for minutes at a time? And I can’t change the shutter speed without it looking wonky?
Thanks, but….
b&
Yeah it freaks me out too. I’m not very good at video and think I have a mind that thinks in stills not moving stills.
Those last two words capture it, I think…yes, I’d think of video as “moving stills,” and I’m sure that’s why I’d make a lousy videographer. Videographers likely share similar anxiety over getting a perfect frame grab…at least, for my ego’s sake, I hope they do….
b&
Right. Digital film is quickly being adopted by Hollywood. Regular plastic film is still used for the bulk of it, but some films and some parts of films are now digital. Here are the main professional digital cameras:
Arri Alexa
AXIOM
Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera
Panavision Genesis
Red Epic
Sony CineAlta
The DSLR film cameras are used mostly where the larger boxes don’t fit as well, like on top of a jeep or mounted on a helmet. A careful comparison test was run showing high and medium-end digital films and celuloid to a room full of technical experts and the consensus was that the quality of the low end was getting very close to the top end and film. Hard to tell the difference.
In the stills arena, digital far outstripped film long ago. Canon’s newest camera, the 5Ds (not plural; the “s” is part of the model designation) has image quality in the low end of the modern range of medium format digital cameras…and you’d need to go all the way to large format film, perhaps even 8×10 film, to match that quality.
It’s also worth noting that the “full frame” cameras like the 5D line are large format movie cameras. 35mm movies filmed and projected with the sprockets running up and down, and there’s about 24mm of usable film between them. Movie formats are therefore capped at 24mm width. But, in a 35mm stills camera, the sprockets are horizontal, giving you 24mm in your smallest dimension. So a “full frame” camera has a 24mm x 36mm sensor, whereas a typical film (like, say, Techniscope) has a 9.5mm x 22 mm film area. This not only gives a significant image quality advantage, but permits a much shallower depth of field to be obtained if so desired.
Where DLSRs tend to fall down compared with high-end digital and film is with the motion capture end of things…”rolling shutter,” “jello,” moiré, that sort of thing. It’s one thing to be able to capture 6 high resolution frames per second with a limit of a few dozen frames before things start to slow down…and another to capture dozens of downsized (requiring additional computation to downsize) images per second without lag. And the cameras have plenty of dynamic range on the sensor…but the recording pipeline is optimized for stills processing, forcing you to either compromise on quality or get into an whole different world of hacks to get access to the RAW data and then process it and so on.
b&
Most of the high end digital film cameras use the full frame sensor. Interestingly, the four thirds system used by Panasonic and Olympus is only 18 mm × 13.5 mm. Similar to the size of Techniscope you mentioned. In addition, the SLR type cameras like 5D have a flip up mirror which requires more space and contributes a lot to camera weight. The mirror is a legacy from the era of plastic film. The for thirds system has no mirror as the image is sent as live video to the eye piece or back display.
Because of the small sensor size, four thirds does not as easily support super wide angle and shallow depth of field.
The latest version of the Panasonic line is the GH4 which shoots 4K onto a standard SD card.
Mirrorless is an interesting battle going on right now. It definitely makes sense for video and popular consumer cameras. It has its advantages for tripod work. I just don’t see the ergonomics of it ever fully replacing the pentaprism for action photography. The current DSLR form factor, I strongly suspect, is going to remain with us for the top end of the stills market for quite some time, even as the video and consumer lines ditch the mirror and never look back.
b&
Framing with a LCD screen, especially in bright light, doesn’t work for what I do. But the flipping mirror seems like old tech. Something will come along to replace it, better than the mirrorless tech we have today.
Exactly. People forget just how danged bright the Sun really is, and how much backlighting it takes to match or overpower it. Maybe with “e-ink”…but refresh times with that are so far away from what’s necessary that that’s just a pipe dream for the time being. There’re things you can do with hoods to shade the Sun…but then you’re right back to a physical layout much like what we have today, only now you’ve got to focus on something inches away from your nose rather than look through the viewfinder with, optionally, whatever dioptric adjustment you might wish.
For what you do, wildlife and especially birds in flight, nothing can compete with a good pentaprism. Nothing else comes close — even the best electronic viewfinders fall short.
Landscape photography can benefit from live view…you can shade the display and zoom in as far as you want for critical focus. It’s a modern equivalent to the old large format film’s ground glass and loupe with a towel over your head and back, only in a much smaller physical package. And, of course, people love it for birthday party snapshots.
…but, once your subject starts moving at anything faster than a very slow walk or if the ambient light is other than ideal, you’re really going to want a pentaprism.
b&
You need to try out some of the mirrorless cameras with viewfinders. They aren’t as good as through the lens, but they are very good. I think you’d be surprised.
My mirrorless has a viewfinder though it isn’t as good as through the lens.
I don’t know, the mirrorless can capture quickly and with the right glass I think there is potential. The problem is Canon is fairly conservative. Sony is a big innovator but their business plan seems to be, “let’s throw stuff to the wall & see what sticks”.
Diana, I meant to quickly comment on the A7S. The most amazing thing about it is that is absolutely great for shooting low light video. It has a few weaknesses for video as well as you might note in some of the reviews. For stills, I don’t really know how it measures up. I’d assume it does well with full frame sensor.
From what I read the A7II is better than the A7S for stills.
In shade I tend to use the LCD screen, in sun I use the viewfinder. Some videographers purchase a separate display, often with a hood. This would be mounted on a rig attached to the camera tripod mount.
These are also quite subject-centered, except the last two that Jerry likes (I do too).
Oh, they are all fantastic shots — I’ve never captured one like them. However they are, as Galen Rowell used to put it: Immature subjects.
If you are taking a photo of a snow leopard in the wild (in the 1970s) or maybe an okapi now, all you need is a clear photo of the animal, nothing artistic is needed. (Immature subject.)
However, if you are taking a photo of a white tailed deer, you had better do something interesting with it (its antlers just emerging about a misty field, its eye just peeking around a tree trunk, two bucks in battle) something to make the photo interesting. (Mature subject.)
Most of these birds are doing interesting things. BIFs are interesting because of the “IF” part, in large part. The snowy owl is an excellent example. (I love the curves of the flight primaries in that shot!)
Those ones that didn’t win are fantastic. The first one looks a little over processed but otherwise all very nice. I don’t know how they select the winners but I can’t believe these great shots can be losers. I often point things like this out to friends who think I’m some sort of nature photography whiz.
You had me worried there for a moment…though I don’t recognize the Latin nor the particular species, I was pretty sure that the fourth one down, identified as Pyrrhuloxia, was a trio of cardinals…and, fortunately, Wikipedia agrees….
Interesting. 🙂 Of course they’re the same genus, but in the birding world the official common name of those guys is actually Pyrrhuloxia. There are often several unofficial common names regionally. Still, I’d bet most folks hearing just “cardinal” would immediately think of the Northern Cardinal. Especially as their ranges overlap significantly.
(Good thing the Vermilion doesn’t overlap!)
Not being in the birding world, I’m glad I recognized them well enough to know that they’re not a JFK. FDR? GWB?
b&
LGB = little gray bird
Or LBJ = Little Brown Job
Wood peckers. That’s like priests isn’t it?
Cardinals and priests?
Yes I was a bit remiss and kept my delight to myself.
I lobed how the cardinal seemed to be pointing as if to blame a sibling for something and the baby woodpeckers look like they are shouting at their mom but are probably just asking to be fed.
“I lobed how the cardinal seemed to be pointing”
At first I thought this was some new, hip, term for thought (as in frontal lobe processing). Then I pattern matched deep affection for the cardinal. Which makes a lot more sense. BTW, I lobed this as much as anyone.
Yeah, friends of mine thought that birds were bullying another bird but there were just baby grackles asking for food from their mother.
I love listening to the soliciting baby birds this time of year!
Today is was a clamorous Chipping Sparrow fledgling in the field.
They almost seem to be saying, “here I am, predators. Clueless baby bird over here!”, and my son & I are always joking, “if there were anything to this evolution business…”
Obviously, being fed is priority one.
Yesterday my wife jumped to her feet and ran to the door because she thought she heard a human baby crying. It turned out to be dinner time at the nearby catbird family. Waaaaaah. Waaaaaah. (means the same in any language)
I can picture that perfectly. 🙂
The frigate bird diving in the water for a fish is probably my favorite Jerry posted. I don’t see how someone could set up a shot like that. Truly remarkable photography all around.
Nothing wrong IMO with giving a bird a nice treat in exchange for a magnificent photo. Baiting is a fraught topic in birding circles, though. It can easily be abused.
Always glad to hear your birding milieu is a fraught as ours out here. ;D
Speaking of blinds, I’d like to have seen his ‘infrastructure’! Wonder how many fish he went through before the bird’s head was in focus, oriented the right way, etc.
For me, it’s a tie between the heron and the seabirds on poles. I won’t try to say which is better…different styles, different intentions, both very well done.
In the mid ’70s I was into photography seriously for awhile, mostly B&W. Did everything myself from film to prints. I used the facilities at the military base we were posted at, which were very nice. Used to spend hours in the dark room experimenting with all kinds of techniques. Amazing what you could do just during the exposure process fiddling with the enlarger or various burn-in techniques to vary contrast in different areas of the print. Not to mention affects from different types of papers and chemical treatments.
Where that rambling was going . . ., there was a technique, that I can’t remember the term for, for producing images similar to this birds on posts image, only more so. The goal was to produce a very basic line drawing looking image, with a minimum of lines that could still evoke the subject. Or perhaps just an interesting pattern / shape. If you didn’t know better, you would never think it was a photograph. It was popular for figure studies.
That sounds really cool. Might be “posterization” that you are thinking of.
I used to do everything myself too. I bought film (I was mostly 35mm) in 100-foot rolls and “rolled my own”. Developed my own film and made my own prints at home.
I learned initially from my Dad and then later from Ansel Adams’ books, the Zone VI Studio books, and from Galen Rowell’s books. And lots and lots of trial and error. And lots and lots of looking at others’ photos.
My Dad got into photography very early in 35mm. He too had access to the photo labs in various military bases and made good use of them. By the late 1960s, he had he darkroom at home. His first camera was an Argus C3, bought just after WWII. He quickly moved up to Leicas and Canons. His mother had always had a Brownie and took quite a few family photos in the early 20th century.
A wonderful thing to grow up with. I also was introduced to photography by my father, though not at the level your father was.
The cameras I used were all Olympus, an OM-1, an OM-2 and a modest 35-ED. I still think that little 35-ED was one of the best fixed lens compact cameras I’ve ever used. Feature wise it was something like what they call a “bridge” camera these days, though it was 35mm. One of my best, award winning, pictures was taken with it. With just a little practice it was hard to take a bad picture with it.
I haven’t been in a dark room in decades, but I can still clearly remember the distinct smell, fondly.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota (computer Science) I convinced the department head to accept an adult-education night class in photography and my foreign language requirement. It turned out to be a good way to meet women.
🙂
Darn, after about 50, they stopped loading for me. I’ll have to go back and try later. Of the ones I saw–just too many spectacular shots to make a choice!
In 1995 I worked for Cray Research and then for NASA, on supercomputers. Peak supercomputer performance was around 10Gflops (for a highly specialized architecture and a machine costing millions of dollars). I think this brand new MacBook Pro is rated at 2.8 Gflops and is a much more general architecture. It cost a little over $2K. NASA backed up their systems on huge digital tape silos, with robots to load and unload the tapes. You could climb inside these things. They had a 1TB capacity and the latency was measured in hours. This MacBook Pro has a 1TB SSD and it’s lightning fast. Finally, the display is like nothing ever seen in those days. Taking one back to 1995 would be like finding the Terminator hand. People would be blown away.
I wouldn’t be able to put numbers to FLOPS…but that they’re roughly the same order of magnitude doesn’t surprise me. And, as you note, storage is so much unbelievably faster…for so much stuff, the I/O throughput and capacity alone would permit the MacBook to do things simply not imaginable in the ’90s. Its SSD, I would suspect, is at least as fast as the RAM the Crays had to work with. Did any of the Crays ever get an entire gigabyte of RAM to work with? These days, sixteen gigabytes of RAM isn’t noteworthy…and, again a terabyte (or more!) of solid state disk.
Hell, just the video architecture these days is insane. A computer with more video RAM than large academic institutions had total offline storage capacity isn’t even remarkable these days.
Or, for that matter…press the shutter on a 5DS, and that’s a 60 Mbyte RAW file. You’d need six boxes of floppies (the new, non-floppy ones!) just to hold one photo! And that’s a compressed file format…uncompressed, it’s over 800 Mbytes. And where would you find anything with enough capacity just to uncompress something that big, let alone actually load it into memory so you could do anything with it? You’d need a gigabyte of RAM just for a single in-memory copy of the image…and the camera can create five of those every second…
In about 1985 I was working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at SRI International, on computer vision. Since we dealt in images we needed a lot of storage compared to everyone else. I recall that we had a champagne party one day to celebrate finally getting 1GB of storage. The disk drives took up a good sized room. Today I use 32GB SD cards in my cameras. They’re about the size of a postage stamp and cost a few dollars.
Wouldn’t it be amazeballs to have a time machine and take that camera and it’s computing power back to 1985? They’d be shocked.
So, what about processing and storage 30 years in the future? Want to speculate? I’m scared to even think about it.
In 1987 about the most powerful desktop workstation you could get was a SUN, running a SPARC RISC chip. It probably cost around $25K. It topped out at 1.6 Mflops, or about .0006 the speed of my MacBook Pro.
Must be Moore’s Law at work. Roughly exponential.
I used one of those! 🙂
And it took a cartridge about the size of a long-line wallet to upgrade my Atari 800 from 48K to 64K RAM.
In the later half of the ’80s I wrote a presentation for TRW for a timing system they were designing for the Air Force. I used a Fat Mac PC, top of the line at that time. Even then, as amazing as it was, I remember well being frustrated about how many floppies I had to juggle around while composing it. You couldn’t work with the whole thing at once because the Fat Mac didn’t have the capacity to hold it all in memory. I’d run out of room on disk F and have to create F(2) to go between F and G. The good ‘ole days.
That was light years beyond my first home computer though. That was a TI-16. 16K total capacity.
Stephen, were you working in Chippewa Falls, WI for Cray?
When I started at the Boeing company in the early 1980s, I worked on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP1170 computer.
This computer was a joy at the time: It was a playground for engineers. It ran on FORTRAN — or at least that’s the compiler I always used (it probably ran PASCAL and C as well). And we had the run of the thing. We swapped out hard disc drives (these were the size of (USian) top-loading clothes washing machines and the disc stacks were like a stack of about 12 charger dining plates all stuck on above the other. These were probably about 1 MB (monstrously huge! 🙂 ).
We also stored our work on 1/2-inch magnetic tape (make sure you make two copies in case one failed!)
It seems pretty primitive; but it had a graphical interface through which we could enter coordinates by touching a drawing placed on its platen, using the precursor of the mouse (two rolling wheels like the center roller on today’s “mice”). It also had one of the first graphical outputs as well (CRT of course) and it was even color (beautiful colors; but just lines or shapes, nothing like photos and images today)!
I was able to program the ‘puter to take finite-element data from my model and then display it such that you could see the entire landing gear of the airplane move through its actuation cycling, under loading, and have the landing loads applied, and see it all in motion, with the deflections under loading shown (at whatever level of exaggeration on the deflections you wanted). This tool turned out to be incredibly useful in identifying where the trouble areas of the system were. (Big deflections and weird motions under load means something ain’t quite right!)
Anyways, as I have told my wife too many times: This computing system took up the space of a decent sized house, in a special computing laboratory, with special wiring and an independent cooling system.
— And it had far less computing power than my little flip cell phone (Motorola M755 – Luddites unite!)
When I was with Cray Research I worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, CA. Cray was just getting into MPP — massively parallel computing. They realized (too late) that the development of cheap, powerful microprocessors that could be networked by the thousands threatened their technology. These days all supercomputers are MPPs and their performance is in the petaflop range. They usually require very different programming approaches, and that’s why Cray hired me.
I had experience with the DEC PDP11. When I was a grad student I had a part time job writing a LISP interpreter for one. It was a very nice machine. Its instruction set was influential in the development of UNIX and C. We used paper tape for backup.
I read that book by Tracy Kidder when it came out. I was deeply involved in computing at the time and it was riveting. He described a project at Data General to develop a minicomputer. Data General is ancient history now, as nearly every computer company of the time is, at least in the computer business — DEC, Compaq, Control Data, SUN, Silicon Graphics, Cray Research, Cray Computer, Univac, Honeywell, even IBM — the list is long. The computer industry is probably the most turbulent and perilous in history.
I loved all the entries, especially the bunting, the vibrant jewels of hummingbirds, the purple gallinules, the woodpecker coming in to land near the babies, the Great Egret, the Green Heron, the desert cardinals, and the birds doing other interesting things like chasing bigger birds, diving or handing off food.
There was one that didn’t seem too spectacular at first, until I noticed the shape of the dead tree where the nest and babies were tucked in… it had the shape of a bird’s head with beak open (title: The Prothonotary Warbler). It’s stunning.
I was struck by the title of one called the Wandering Albatross — that’s gotta be PCC heading off on his road trip.
Stephen, you should have entered even if you didn’t think you could win, and then all of us here could be scrolling through and have the pleasure of saying, “Hey, that’s Stephen from Idaho. I know that guy! Excellent photographer!”
I dream of getting shots like these.
I kept looking for your name–I kept saying to myself as I scrolled down “Stephen Baranard’s are better than these.”
I kept looking for your name too! 🙂
I think those are all more or less once-in-a-lifetime shots. A lot of luck at work (and also being out there, day after day, of course).
I was encouraged to enter, but I knew I’d have no chance of winning. I think it cost something, and I’m cheap that way — no chance, no money.
I agree, these are “once-in-a-lifetime” shots. (I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that.) There are so many talented amateurs and professionals with excellent modern gear and technique, each taking many thousands of shots a year, all over the world, and sharing them. The incremental cost of taking a photo is nearly zero. The incremental cost of sharing a photo is nearly zero.
If I had a time machine, I’d take my laptop (15″ Retina MacBook Pro) back to The National Geographic office in 1995 to pitch these photos, and a lot of other things, until the battery dies.
In 1995…that MacBook Pro could well have been the most powerful computer in existence. Might be able to do a wee few more interesting things than use it as a photo album…assuming “they” don’t “appropriate” it….
b&
I meant to reply, but it entered as a new comment. See below.
“a lot of luck involved”
Well, with wild animals there is bound to be an element of luck involved but the implication (if it was intended) that these photographers just got lucky is, I think, rather unfair. Virtually all of these pictures will have required not just fancy kit but also a good deal of photographic skill and excellent ‘field craft’. They fully merit the honour of being selected for Audubon Magazine’s top 100 and selected from those 100 for display by Jerry.
I agree that many of Stephen’s pictures would sit quite happily in this company but I am pretty sure that his pictures are not just down to luck either. The fact that it is easy and cheap with digital cameras to take a large number of pictures does not mean that you can just fire off a thousand or so shots and expect that one or two of them will be winners.
Yes, no issue with what you’ve said.
However, nabbing the exact instant of, for instance, that green heron is pure luck. There’s no way a human could time such a thing. My guess is, unless that photographer was insanely lucky, they tried for that shot hundreds or thousands of times (and sent the results to the computer’s recycle bin) before getting that image.*
Hence my comment about them being once-in-a-lifetime shots.
The rest of my comment “also being out there, day after day, of course” is meant to indicate that fortune favors the bold (and the prepared and well-placed). So, yes, of course, lots of hard work and field smarts to place yourself in the right place at the right time.
(* I am a pretty well experienced outdoor photographer, many 10s of thousands of shots — I started in the days before digital, before motor-drives, and I shot all-manual, all the time, I didn’t even use a light meter).
I disagree to an extent. I think there is undeniably a certain amount of chance or luck at play in photographing un-staged things like wildlife. And that yes, firing off a 1000 shots does indeed significantly increase your chances of capturing a winning shot. And that amateurs on occasion luck upon winning shots that would make a pro proud to have captured. It’s just much rarer than pros doing so.
However, it is also true that skill and talent are also a big factor. The old adage, “luck favors those who come prepared,” definitely applies here.
I think we are all broadly in agreement. I note that two of the photos in the amateur category are by the same person, Carl Woo. If he’d won the lottery twice I’d agree he is a very lucky man, but taking two top quality pictures, selected amongst the best 100 entries in the AM competition definitely reflects some considerable talent, I think.
Woo (W)hoo(?)!
Certainly motor drive is significant in capturing the critical moment. My camera, the Panasonic GH3 is pretty average and can shoot 7 frames per second at high resolution. Some do better. If I see a bird approaching some noms, I can shoot 50 frames to cover the whole event. I’ve tried this several times and still find that, without having made all the other judgements involved such as background, angle, and light, etc. I’m not likely to get much better than so-so.
I don’t try this often though since my main interest is video.
I think the most important camera feature in such a situation isn’t frames/sec, but an accurate and responsive auto focus.
Yes indeed. Theoretically, both great auto focus and frames per second can make capturing a one in a million shot one in a thousand.
The Canon 7D was created as their “prosumer” high-performance camera that shoots 8 frames per second. At the time, the 5D Mark II was the go-to all-around camera, legendary amongst wedding photographers; its frame rate was just barely under half that of the 7D, at 3.9 FPS.
Canon released the new version of the 5D, the 5D Mark III, as an upgrade for the same market segment. It got a modest boost in frame rate, to 6 FPS, still significantly less than the 7D’s 8 FPS…but it also got the autofocus system from the flagship model, the 1DX. And the 5DIII, even with its slower frame rate, stomps all over the 7D for action photography.
…and then, of course, Canon revised the 7D with the 7D Mark II, and the 7DII shoots 10 FPS with the new autofocus system, so that’s now the preferred action camera.
But, yes. Even a camera that shoots half again as many frames per second can’t compare to one with a superior autofocus system.
Cheers,
b&
As a videographer, I was very tempted to get a 7D or a 5D Mark II. These two cameras took the independent film world by storm. The reason I ended up with a GH3 was it provides comparable image quality yet is smaller and is nearly half the weight. It also costs about a third of the Mark III.
Not just the indies. Mega blockbusters, too:
http://redrockmicro.blogspot.ca/2015/06/dslr-insider-on-mad-max-fury-road.html#sthash.BPGCCbAA.dpuf
b&
The Sony mirrorless full frame A7S is a nice video machine as well. Expensive though. I’ve been mulling over getting one of the mirrorless full frames to replace my NEX-7.
Video scares the shit out of me. I have enough trouble with stills…and now I’ve got to deal with a couple dozen of them every single second!? And for minutes at a time? And I can’t change the shutter speed without it looking wonky?
Thanks, but….
b&
Yeah it freaks me out too. I’m not very good at video and think I have a mind that thinks in stills not moving stills.
Those last two words capture it, I think…yes, I’d think of video as “moving stills,” and I’m sure that’s why I’d make a lousy videographer. Videographers likely share similar anxiety over getting a perfect frame grab…at least, for my ego’s sake, I hope they do….
b&
Right. Digital film is quickly being adopted by Hollywood. Regular plastic film is still used for the bulk of it, but some films and some parts of films are now digital. Here are the main professional digital cameras:
Arri Alexa
AXIOM
Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera
Panavision Genesis
Red Epic
Sony CineAlta
The DSLR film cameras are used mostly where the larger boxes don’t fit as well, like on top of a jeep or mounted on a helmet. A careful comparison test was run showing high and medium-end digital films and celuloid to a room full of technical experts and the consensus was that the quality of the low end was getting very close to the top end and film. Hard to tell the difference.
In the stills arena, digital far outstripped film long ago. Canon’s newest camera, the 5Ds (not plural; the “s” is part of the model designation) has image quality in the low end of the modern range of medium format digital cameras…and you’d need to go all the way to large format film, perhaps even 8×10 film, to match that quality.
It’s also worth noting that the “full frame” cameras like the 5D line are large format movie cameras. 35mm movies filmed and projected with the sprockets running up and down, and there’s about 24mm of usable film between them. Movie formats are therefore capped at 24mm width. But, in a 35mm stills camera, the sprockets are horizontal, giving you 24mm in your smallest dimension. So a “full frame” camera has a 24mm x 36mm sensor, whereas a typical film (like, say, Techniscope) has a 9.5mm x 22 mm film area. This not only gives a significant image quality advantage, but permits a much shallower depth of field to be obtained if so desired.
Where DLSRs tend to fall down compared with high-end digital and film is with the motion capture end of things…”rolling shutter,” “jello,” moiré, that sort of thing. It’s one thing to be able to capture 6 high resolution frames per second with a limit of a few dozen frames before things start to slow down…and another to capture dozens of downsized (requiring additional computation to downsize) images per second without lag. And the cameras have plenty of dynamic range on the sensor…but the recording pipeline is optimized for stills processing, forcing you to either compromise on quality or get into an whole different world of hacks to get access to the RAW data and then process it and so on.
b&
Most of the high end digital film cameras use the full frame sensor. Interestingly, the four thirds system used by Panasonic and Olympus is only 18 mm × 13.5 mm. Similar to the size of Techniscope you mentioned. In addition, the SLR type cameras like 5D have a flip up mirror which requires more space and contributes a lot to camera weight. The mirror is a legacy from the era of plastic film. The for thirds system has no mirror as the image is sent as live video to the eye piece or back display.
Because of the small sensor size, four thirds does not as easily support super wide angle and shallow depth of field.
The latest version of the Panasonic line is the GH4 which shoots 4K onto a standard SD card.
Mirrorless is an interesting battle going on right now. It definitely makes sense for video and popular consumer cameras. It has its advantages for tripod work. I just don’t see the ergonomics of it ever fully replacing the pentaprism for action photography. The current DSLR form factor, I strongly suspect, is going to remain with us for the top end of the stills market for quite some time, even as the video and consumer lines ditch the mirror and never look back.
b&
Framing with a LCD screen, especially in bright light, doesn’t work for what I do. But the flipping mirror seems like old tech. Something will come along to replace it, better than the mirrorless tech we have today.
Exactly. People forget just how danged bright the Sun really is, and how much backlighting it takes to match or overpower it. Maybe with “e-ink”…but refresh times with that are so far away from what’s necessary that that’s just a pipe dream for the time being. There’re things you can do with hoods to shade the Sun…but then you’re right back to a physical layout much like what we have today, only now you’ve got to focus on something inches away from your nose rather than look through the viewfinder with, optionally, whatever dioptric adjustment you might wish.
For what you do, wildlife and especially birds in flight, nothing can compete with a good pentaprism. Nothing else comes close — even the best electronic viewfinders fall short.
Landscape photography can benefit from live view…you can shade the display and zoom in as far as you want for critical focus. It’s a modern equivalent to the old large format film’s ground glass and loupe with a towel over your head and back, only in a much smaller physical package. And, of course, people love it for birthday party snapshots.
…but, once your subject starts moving at anything faster than a very slow walk or if the ambient light is other than ideal, you’re really going to want a pentaprism.
b&
You need to try out some of the mirrorless cameras with viewfinders. They aren’t as good as through the lens, but they are very good. I think you’d be surprised.
My mirrorless has a viewfinder though it isn’t as good as through the lens.
I don’t know, the mirrorless can capture quickly and with the right glass I think there is potential. The problem is Canon is fairly conservative. Sony is a big innovator but their business plan seems to be, “let’s throw stuff to the wall & see what sticks”.
Diana, I meant to quickly comment on the A7S. The most amazing thing about it is that is absolutely great for shooting low light video. It has a few weaknesses for video as well as you might note in some of the reviews. For stills, I don’t really know how it measures up. I’d assume it does well with full frame sensor.
From what I read the A7II is better than the A7S for stills.
In shade I tend to use the LCD screen, in sun I use the viewfinder. Some videographers purchase a separate display, often with a hood. This would be mounted on a rig attached to the camera tripod mount.
These are also quite subject-centered, except the last two that Jerry likes (I do too).
Agree.
Though I’m amazed at the frigatebird shot, and find the Pyrrhuloxias most charming.
Oh, they are all fantastic shots — I’ve never captured one like them. However they are, as Galen Rowell used to put it: Immature subjects.
If you are taking a photo of a snow leopard in the wild (in the 1970s) or maybe an okapi now, all you need is a clear photo of the animal, nothing artistic is needed. (Immature subject.)
However, if you are taking a photo of a white tailed deer, you had better do something interesting with it (its antlers just emerging about a misty field, its eye just peeking around a tree trunk, two bucks in battle) something to make the photo interesting. (Mature subject.)
Most of these birds are doing interesting things. BIFs are interesting because of the “IF” part, in large part. The snowy owl is an excellent example. (I love the curves of the flight primaries in that shot!)
All are very nice. Of the ones posted here, the Green Heron is my favorite. Beautiful!
I like the insect photobombing the amateur winner: http://www.audubon.org/sites/default/files/sfw_donald_wuori_prothonotary_warbler_.jpg
That is a great photobomb. And the tree the birds are in looks like a swordfish swallowing them up.
Fun. 🙂 Looks like a shed exoskeleton.
Great shot in general, IMO.
Wonderful images.
I too, love the two you show at the bottom. The graphic-looking one has the contrast cranked “up to 11!”
That’s some extra special contrast…most just go up to “10”. 😉
Yes, but OURS go to 11! 🙂
Those ones that didn’t win are fantastic. The first one looks a little over processed but otherwise all very nice. I don’t know how they select the winners but I can’t believe these great shots can be losers. I often point things like this out to friends who think I’m some sort of nature photography whiz.
I’m surprised you didn’t comment on the expressions of the cardinals and the woodpeckers….
b&
Cardinals? What cardinals? 😉
You had me worried there for a moment…though I don’t recognize the Latin nor the particular species, I was pretty sure that the fourth one down, identified as Pyrrhuloxia, was a trio of cardinals…and, fortunately, Wikipedia agrees….
b&
Interesting. 🙂 Of course they’re the same genus, but in the birding world the official common name of those guys is actually Pyrrhuloxia. There are often several unofficial common names regionally. Still, I’d bet most folks hearing just “cardinal” would immediately think of the Northern Cardinal. Especially as their ranges overlap significantly.
(Good thing the Vermilion doesn’t overlap!)
Not being in the birding world, I’m glad I recognized them well enough to know that they’re not a JFK. FDR? GWB?
b&
LGB = little gray bird
Or LBJ = Little Brown Job
Wood peckers. That’s like priests isn’t it?
Cardinals and priests?
Now, now.
😀
Yes I was a bit remiss and kept my delight to myself.
I lobed how the cardinal seemed to be pointing as if to blame a sibling for something and the baby woodpeckers look like they are shouting at their mom but are probably just asking to be fed.
“I lobed how the cardinal seemed to be pointing”
At first I thought this was some new, hip, term for thought (as in frontal lobe processing). Then I pattern matched deep affection for the cardinal. Which makes a lot more sense. BTW, I lobed this as much as anyone.
“…and the baby woodpeckers look like they are shouting at their mom but are probably just asking to be fed.”
Pretty much the same thing for a lot of birds. 😀
Yeah, friends of mine thought that birds were bullying another bird but there were just baby grackles asking for food from their mother.
I love listening to the soliciting baby birds this time of year!
Today is was a clamorous Chipping Sparrow fledgling in the field.
They almost seem to be saying, “here I am, predators. Clueless baby bird over here!”, and my son & I are always joking, “if there were anything to this evolution business…”
Obviously, being fed is priority one.
Yesterday my wife jumped to her feet and ran to the door because she thought she heard a human baby crying. It turned out to be dinner time at the nearby catbird family. Waaaaaah. Waaaaaah. (means the same in any language)
I can picture that perfectly. 🙂
The frigate bird diving in the water for a fish is probably my favorite Jerry posted. I don’t see how someone could set up a shot like that. Truly remarkable photography all around.
That’s what I was wondering, too! Maybe had the fish tethered by a thread or something?
Yeah, Stephen B. below said he thought it might have been baited. There is no way it could have been just luck…well yeah, luck, but not blind luck.
Nothing wrong IMO with giving a bird a nice treat in exchange for a magnificent photo. Baiting is a fraught topic in birding circles, though. It can easily be abused.
Always glad to hear your birding milieu is a fraught as ours out here. ;D
Speaking of blinds, I’d like to have seen his ‘infrastructure’! Wonder how many fish he went through before the bird’s head was in focus, oriented the right way, etc.
Black skimmers are my favorite.
I love the green heron: all this manierism for such a tiny snack!
I’ve only looked at the ones on WEIT, but my favorite is the Magnificent Frigatebird. It pops. I’d guess the bird was baited in.
If Audubon himself could see these!
For me, it’s a tie between the heron and the seabirds on poles. I won’t try to say which is better…different styles, different intentions, both very well done.
b&
I like the sea birds on poles. Beautiful!
I looked at the 100% crop just to be sure it was actually a photo with the contrast cranked (up to 11). It looked so graphical to me.
Back in the pleistocene, I would have printed such a photo on a photostat machine to achieve a similar effect.
In the mid ’70s I was into photography seriously for awhile, mostly B&W. Did everything myself from film to prints. I used the facilities at the military base we were posted at, which were very nice. Used to spend hours in the dark room experimenting with all kinds of techniques. Amazing what you could do just during the exposure process fiddling with the enlarger or various burn-in techniques to vary contrast in different areas of the print. Not to mention affects from different types of papers and chemical treatments.
Where that rambling was going . . ., there was a technique, that I can’t remember the term for, for producing images similar to this birds on posts image, only more so. The goal was to produce a very basic line drawing looking image, with a minimum of lines that could still evoke the subject. Or perhaps just an interesting pattern / shape. If you didn’t know better, you would never think it was a photograph. It was popular for figure studies.
That sounds really cool. Might be “posterization” that you are thinking of.
I used to do everything myself too. I bought film (I was mostly 35mm) in 100-foot rolls and “rolled my own”. Developed my own film and made my own prints at home.
I learned initially from my Dad and then later from Ansel Adams’ books, the Zone VI Studio books, and from Galen Rowell’s books. And lots and lots of trial and error. And lots and lots of looking at others’ photos.
My Dad got into photography very early in 35mm. He too had access to the photo labs in various military bases and made good use of them. By the late 1960s, he had he darkroom at home. His first camera was an Argus C3, bought just after WWII. He quickly moved up to Leicas and Canons. His mother had always had a Brownie and took quite a few family photos in the early 20th century.
A wonderful thing to grow up with. I also was introduced to photography by my father, though not at the level your father was.
The cameras I used were all Olympus, an OM-1, an OM-2 and a modest 35-ED. I still think that little 35-ED was one of the best fixed lens compact cameras I’ve ever used. Feature wise it was something like what they call a “bridge” camera these days, though it was 35mm. One of my best, award winning, pictures was taken with it. With just a little practice it was hard to take a bad picture with it.
I haven’t been in a dark room in decades, but I can still clearly remember the distinct smell, fondly.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota (computer Science) I convinced the department head to accept an adult-education night class in photography and my foreign language requirement. It turned out to be a good way to meet women.
🙂
Darn, after about 50, they stopped loading for me. I’ll have to go back and try later. Of the ones I saw–just too many spectacular shots to make a choice!
Thwarted by your DSL!
It hates me!
In 1995 I worked for Cray Research and then for NASA, on supercomputers. Peak supercomputer performance was around 10Gflops (for a highly specialized architecture and a machine costing millions of dollars). I think this brand new MacBook Pro is rated at 2.8 Gflops and is a much more general architecture. It cost a little over $2K. NASA backed up their systems on huge digital tape silos, with robots to load and unload the tapes. You could climb inside these things. They had a 1TB capacity and the latency was measured in hours. This MacBook Pro has a 1TB SSD and it’s lightning fast. Finally, the display is like nothing ever seen in those days. Taking one back to 1995 would be like finding the Terminator hand. People would be blown away.
I wouldn’t be able to put numbers to FLOPS…but that they’re roughly the same order of magnitude doesn’t surprise me. And, as you note, storage is so much unbelievably faster…for so much stuff, the I/O throughput and capacity alone would permit the MacBook to do things simply not imaginable in the ’90s. Its SSD, I would suspect, is at least as fast as the RAM the Crays had to work with. Did any of the Crays ever get an entire gigabyte of RAM to work with? These days, sixteen gigabytes of RAM isn’t noteworthy…and, again a terabyte (or more!) of solid state disk.
Hell, just the video architecture these days is insane. A computer with more video RAM than large academic institutions had total offline storage capacity isn’t even remarkable these days.
Or, for that matter…press the shutter on a 5DS, and that’s a 60 Mbyte RAW file. You’d need six boxes of floppies (the new, non-floppy ones!) just to hold one photo! And that’s a compressed file format…uncompressed, it’s over 800 Mbytes. And where would you find anything with enough capacity just to uncompress something that big, let alone actually load it into memory so you could do anything with it? You’d need a gigabyte of RAM just for a single in-memory copy of the image…and the camera can create five of those every second…
…now get off my lawn….
b&
In about 1985 I was working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at SRI International, on computer vision. Since we dealt in images we needed a lot of storage compared to everyone else. I recall that we had a champagne party one day to celebrate finally getting 1GB of storage. The disk drives took up a good sized room. Today I use 32GB SD cards in my cameras. They’re about the size of a postage stamp and cost a few dollars.
Wouldn’t it be amazeballs to have a time machine and take that camera and it’s computing power back to 1985? They’d be shocked.
So, what about processing and storage 30 years in the future? Want to speculate? I’m scared to even think about it.
In 1987 about the most powerful desktop workstation you could get was a SUN, running a SPARC RISC chip. It probably cost around $25K. It topped out at 1.6 Mflops, or about .0006 the speed of my MacBook Pro.
Must be Moore’s Law at work. Roughly exponential.
I used one of those! 🙂
And it took a cartridge about the size of a long-line wallet to upgrade my Atari 800 from 48K to 64K RAM.
In the later half of the ’80s I wrote a presentation for TRW for a timing system they were designing for the Air Force. I used a Fat Mac PC, top of the line at that time. Even then, as amazing as it was, I remember well being frustrated about how many floppies I had to juggle around while composing it. You couldn’t work with the whole thing at once because the Fat Mac didn’t have the capacity to hold it all in memory. I’d run out of room on disk F and have to create F(2) to go between F and G. The good ‘ole days.
That was light years beyond my first home computer though. That was a TI-16. 16K total capacity.
Stephen, were you working in Chippewa Falls, WI for Cray?
When I started at the Boeing company in the early 1980s, I worked on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP1170 computer.
This computer was a joy at the time: It was a playground for engineers. It ran on FORTRAN — or at least that’s the compiler I always used (it probably ran PASCAL and C as well). And we had the run of the thing. We swapped out hard disc drives (these were the size of (USian) top-loading clothes washing machines and the disc stacks were like a stack of about 12 charger dining plates all stuck on above the other. These were probably about 1 MB (monstrously huge! 🙂 ).
We also stored our work on 1/2-inch magnetic tape (make sure you make two copies in case one failed!)
It seems pretty primitive; but it had a graphical interface through which we could enter coordinates by touching a drawing placed on its platen, using the precursor of the mouse (two rolling wheels like the center roller on today’s “mice”). It also had one of the first graphical outputs as well (CRT of course) and it was even color (beautiful colors; but just lines or shapes, nothing like photos and images today)!
I was able to program the ‘puter to take finite-element data from my model and then display it such that you could see the entire landing gear of the airplane move through its actuation cycling, under loading, and have the landing loads applied, and see it all in motion, with the deflections under loading shown (at whatever level of exaggeration on the deflections you wanted). This tool turned out to be incredibly useful in identifying where the trouble areas of the system were. (Big deflections and weird motions under load means something ain’t quite right!)
Anyways, as I have told my wife too many times: This computing system took up the space of a decent sized house, in a special computing laboratory, with special wiring and an independent cooling system.
— And it had far less computing power than my little flip cell phone (Motorola M755 – Luddites unite!)
When I was with Cray Research I worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, CA. Cray was just getting into MPP — massively parallel computing. They realized (too late) that the development of cheap, powerful microprocessors that could be networked by the thousands threatened their technology. These days all supercomputers are MPPs and their performance is in the petaflop range. They usually require very different programming approaches, and that’s why Cray hired me.
I had experience with the DEC PDP11. When I was a grad student I had a part time job writing a LISP interpreter for one. It was a very nice machine. Its instruction set was influential in the development of UNIX and C. We used paper tape for backup.
Ah, The Soul of a New Machine era. 🙂 I loved that book. (I do realize your were working on the other end of the size range!)
I read that book by Tracy Kidder when it came out. I was deeply involved in computing at the time and it was riveting. He described a project at Data General to develop a minicomputer. Data General is ancient history now, as nearly every computer company of the time is, at least in the computer business — DEC, Compaq, Control Data, SUN, Silicon Graphics, Cray Research, Cray Computer, Univac, Honeywell, even IBM — the list is long. The computer industry is probably the most turbulent and perilous in history.
I’m always confused by Tracy being a guy’s name in the US. Definitely a boy-called-Sue sort of thing.
I was reflecting on the same thing, thinking of TSoaNM. I thought it was riveting too, though before reading it I’d never have imagined so.
Was the photo of the Pyrrhuloxia perhaps titled “Who farted?”
What amazing photos!
I loved all the entries, especially the bunting, the vibrant jewels of hummingbirds, the purple gallinules, the woodpecker coming in to land near the babies, the Great Egret, the Green Heron, the desert cardinals, and the birds doing other interesting things like chasing bigger birds, diving or handing off food.
There was one that didn’t seem too spectacular at first, until I noticed the shape of the dead tree where the nest and babies were tucked in… it had the shape of a bird’s head with beak open (title: The Prothonotary Warbler). It’s stunning.
I was struck by the title of one called the Wandering Albatross — that’s gotta be PCC heading off on his road trip.
Stephen, you should have entered even if you didn’t think you could win, and then all of us here could be scrolling through and have the pleasure of saying, “Hey, that’s Stephen from Idaho. I know that guy! Excellent photographer!”