Honesty in Posting Bird Photographs

I recently read an article on certain practices in posting bird photographs online. Generally it dealt with honesty particularly if the picture being posted was that of a captive bird or taken in the wild. The term "captive" has quite a broad coverage - including, but not limited to - birds in cages, zoos or aviaries. It also applies to tethered birds (usually parrots and raptors), those used in falconry, and even "free-roaming" avian species that are in farms or similar conditions.

Taken at the Philippine Eagle Center in Davao. This is a captive bird.

Helemeted Guineafowl taken in a farm in Pililla, Rizal

Another issue which I would like to add is the posting of composite images. Mostly these are done to show the progress of a bird in flight or when prey is being captured. Sometimes the background is altered to make the image more aesthetic. Then there is the combining of two or more images to make the photo more attractive and interesting.

composite of two images

Photographs like those, in my opinion, should be properly labeled as such...that the photo was not taken in the wild or if it was a composite image or had been altered using Photoshop or similar programs. We bird photographers should be honest whenever we post pictures we have taken.

The best bird photographers are the honest bird photographers.

Clone Cleansing

To clone or not to clone - that is the dilemma being faced by bird photographers all over the world. That out-of-focus branch that becomes a distraction from the subject - should it be cloned off or let it remain?

Making "changes" from the original photograph using such tools as Adobe Photoshop has been and continues to be the subject of seemingly endless debates. Cropping, adjusting the saturation, brightness and even sharpness are considered acceptable primarily because they don't alter the "natural" quality of the image. Many adhere to the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) position. After all as a nature photographer, one should present his subject in its natural environment, right?

Then there are those who prefer a more "aesthetic" view - where the photograph must be as clean as possible, removing (or cloning out) any object that will distract the attention from the subject bird.

As to this second group I must confess: 

I. Am. Guilty.

Not always - but only in very, very few occasions. For one thing I am not that good at Photoshop. Clone-oscopy is not my strong point. If the distracting objects are all over the image, then forget it, I'll stick to the wysiwyg principle. 

Below is an example of a photograph of Blue-throated Bee-eater that I took in Subic. The original shot had some branches that touch the bird's belly. After cropping, lightening and adjusting the contrast and saturation, I decided to clone off the obtrusive branch. On the left is the original. On the right is the "photoshopped" version.

So which one is better?

Another change that I also do sometimes is blurring the background. Again, not being an expert in Photoshop, I only do this to my photographs where I can easily separate the bird from the background. For me this is also another way of minimizing the distracting objects from the main subject.  The sample below was a photo of a Lesser Coucal taken by my wife, Cynthia. By blurring the branches and leaves behind the bird, the viewer will tend to focus more towards the subject. Again, on the left is the original and on the right is the cropped and cleaned version.

My stand is that when major changes like these are done on a photograph it must be declared accordingly when publishing or posting it for public viewing. Don't you think so?

Pea Shooter No More!

Call me lazy. Call me unadventurous. But I am a pea-shooter. Or to be more technically precise, a "P-shooter". "P", of course, stands for the Program mode setting of modern DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras. In other words, I am just a glorified "point-and-shoot" picture taker (at this point, it seems inappropriate to refer to myself as a photographer). My rationale for being so is that I wouldn't want to twiddle with the camera settings when the subject of my photography could disappear at any moment. Despite this amateurish stance on taking pictures of birds, I did have some pretty good results of which I am quite satisified. I am quite happy as a P-shooter of birds.


Until recently.


A bird photographer friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

Not surprisingly, this taunting photograph elicited a barrage of comments. It was a comment from another bird photographer friend of mine that got my attention. In effect, he said that what's the use of having an expensive camera and lens if they are on P mode all the time. A cellphone camera could have gotten similar results, he said.


Ouch!


I was hurt! I was shocked! I was embarrassed! It was as if a knife had been plunged into my photographic soul. I know that my friend never intended his comment as a personal attack on me (we haven't done some bird photography together yet, so he couldn't have known my camera settings while in the field). 


After the pain of self-humiliation subsided, I once again began to think rationally. I recalled the time when I first got started in photography many decades ago. Of course, I was using film then. With fixed ISOs. Cameras don't have any automatic settings in those days which means I knew how to set the apertures and shutter speeds in order to obtain decent pictures. But then, I wasn't taking pictures of birds yet. Manual settings were easier to manipulate with subjects such as people (I can always tell them to stop moving) or landscapes (you can change apertures or speeds and the green mountain would still be there in front of you). So I resolved to accept this challenge that presented itself to me. Going back to manual settings - it's just like riding a bike, right?


Saturday, my wife and I decided to go to Antipolo to check on the status of the Slaty-legged Crake family. It was a drizzly morning - a perfect opportunity to once again hone my skills in photography. To make the challenge even more formidable, I opted to bring my aging Canon 40D instead of the better light-responding 5D MkII.


It wasn't very birdy that morning - the Crakes were even a no-show - but I was able to take pictures of some birds, using manual settings, despite the dark and gloomy uncooperative weather.

Pied Bush Chat - manual under natural light, 1/125, f5.6, ISO-1250, partial metering

Spotted dove - manual under natural light, 1/320, f5.6 ISO-400, spot metering

White-throated Kingfisher - manual under natural light, 1/100, f6.3, ISO-400, spot metering

I am pretty happy with the results if I may say so myself. Perhaps now I can say I am no longer a P shooter. I am into M!

Gone Digital

I still used the film camera sparingly while visions of digital cameras danced in my head – that was while I was even wide awake! Finally, I could not hold off any longer and took the old photographers’ leap from film to digital SLR. It was after all my birthday, so why not give myself a present. So off to Canoga Camera my wife and I went. The salesperson was indeed friendly and helpful. Of course per recommendation, I chose the Canon 300D kit (which included the 18-55mm lens) then the current rage in digital SLRs. When the salesperson asked which body color I wanted - Silver or Black, and being the Silas Marner that I am, I chose Silver because it costs $20 less. (Bad choice – Silver reflects light and that would surely bother my bird subjects and, besides, Black looks more “professional”). There I went: bad bird photographer right off the bat.

I kept my son’s 70-300 zoom and used that with my 300D for my venture into digital bird photography. The gentleman was right, I could see my shots almost instantly. What it meant was that now it won’t take me a week to find out how bad a bird photographer I was! Somehow I was using my new camera like it was a film camera – that is, I was very selective with my shots as if I do not want to waste any frame with a bad shot. I cannot even use up a 512MB Compact Flash card in a half a day’s session, shooting in jpeg at that! For me the subject must be in a good pose before I click on the shutter button. Now bear in mind that I’m shooting birds, creatures of constant motion. And even when my subject cooperated and posed for a while, the pictures still came out soft (a photography term to indicate that the subject is not sharp, as in the edges are “soft”). The results of my endeavors have been consistently of poor quality. It kept me pondering what could be wrong. Frustration was beginning to nag me.

The Beginning

Orange-crowned Warbler

Chestnut-sided Warbler

After a long hiatus which culminated in the death of my first wife in July, 2003, I have begun birding again. In October, 2003, I joined the Pasadena Audubon Society and participated in several of their birdwalks. Also, I began constantly monitoring various Yahoo listservs on local birding activities. In October, 2004, a month after I had remarried, there was a flurry of messages saying that there were a lot of warblers seen among the tamarisk trees along Laguna Road in Camarillo (henceforth referred to as Laguna Tams). I convinced my new wife, Cynthia, who was a complete tyro when it came to birding to come with me and see for ourselves what the shouting was all about. I borrowed my son's Canon film camera (I forgot what model) with a 70-300 zoom lens attached to it.

When we arrived, there were already several birders there, all of whom were quite excited as they kept murmuring "American Redstart" to everyone who joined the group, all the while pointing to small olive-greenish birds up in the trees. Being newbies, we were not aware that this bird was an uncommon visitor to southern California. As I was trying to photograph the various warblers (including the Redstart, but failing badly there) that were cavorting among the tamarisks, frustrated at re-learning photography at so difficult subjects, a gentleman approached me. He was carrying a camera with a huge lens (it was a 400mm). He noticed I was still using film and he went into this tirade of how digital photography is so much better even for one who is not an "expert" (I guess he can tell by my struggles that I was new at this). To prove his point he showed me the pictures he took just a few minutes earlier. "See?", he said convincingly, "you don't have to wait for your film to be processed to see your photos". He recommended the Canon 300D, then the current rage in digital photography. "Check out Canoga Camera", he said, "they have very helpful guys there and their prices are lower than most camera stores".

A week later, after looking at the pictures I took at Laguna Tams (some turned out to be OK like the pictures above) and recalling the images I saw from the gentleman's camera, I decided to go digital. Little did I know then that I would be hooked into bird photography. The joys and sorrows of which will be the subjects of my musings as a bad bird photographer.