Digital Bird Watching and Digital Photography for Beginners Part 2

This part of the series deals with using your computer and imaging software such as Photoshop to make your bird photos look the way you thought they would when you took them in the field. This is where you can compensate for having spent relatively little money on field equipment such as cameras. It's a little like washing your car - it doesn't run any better and isn't worth any more money but it looks better and makes you feel good.

Downloading from the camera. Although my camera came with Canon software - which is fine - I don't use it. I download pictures to my hard drive using the software that is inherent in XP which is my operating system. Perhaps your computer is newer and uses Vista - it really doesn't matter. However, how you get the images from your camera onto your computer is not important as long as they do get there and you can find them once you have downloaded them. It is my habit to build a folder on the desktop and download into it. When I am all finished with the project, I will move that folder elsewhere so that I don't grow an increasing clutter on the desktop. Again, it does not matter how you get the images from the camera or where you put them. All that matters is that you can find the images for the next step.

Editing the photo. My software of choice is Photoshop which is an Adobe product. My version is fairly old (6.0) but it works just fine for what I want to do. If you go out to buy a current version of Photoshop you will be surprised by the price: typically it costs around $650.00. If you have no photo editing software installed, you might go shopping here: http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/photo-editing-software/review.html . However, let's assume that you have a program that gives the option of adjusting size, resolution, colors, contrast, etc..

Making the bird bigger - cropping. It is not unusual to have the bird be a fairly small image somewhere on the larger photo. Now, here is where you get to be great bird tracker and hunter. In Part 1 of this series I suggested that you use the largest format your camera will deliver. In the case of my Canon S21S the format is 2592 X 1944. This does two things that will seem bad at first glance: it sets a picture on the computer monitor that is way larger than the viewable surface and it uses a lot of storage space on the disk. If your software has a crop tool you will solve the size problem very easily. If you have purchased a high capacity card for the camera - such as 1 or 2 GB, then you will have solved the storage space problem. So now you have this enormous image which has a bird in it somewhere. Use your crop tool to make a border around the bird which will center the bird and give you an image of about 640 X 480. If this is too small for the bird, adjust your cropping to fit. But you can end up with a photo of the bird which will look like you were right on top of it when you pushed the shutter button. You will have lost a goodly portion of the rest of the picture, but you didn't care about the trees and the hills anyway. In my experience, cropping is the most important function of editing a picture. It will allow you to send and store bird photos without having enormous file sizes.

Quality changes. Your photo editing software will probably give you the ability to adjust parameters such as contrast, brightness, hue, and sharpness. I can't walk through these with you here because I don't know what software you are using. However, I have found that most dramatic improvement with a photo is made using the contrast and brightness adjustments. By using these two together you can fix a washed-out photo or brighten up a dark photo. Digital cameras often try to do too much and, consequently, it is hard to compensate for odd lighting conditions when you take the photo. Contrast and brightness will bring about enormous changes. My point here is that, because the photo is digital and has a lot of data embedded in it, you have the ability to approximate on the computer what a professional with a lot of very expensive equipment does in the field. There is no substitute for a perfect 35 mm photo of a bird in the field; however, you and I are mere mortals and we can appreciate our own photos as much as we like the pros'.

So, really, what have I done here with all these words? I am trying to say that you can do great things with bird photos if you are willing to use your computer and spend some time playing with your pictures. You have nothing to loose since digital photos are all free and since, if you are clever, you have saved the originals somewhere that will protect them from being replaced as you work.

The photo I have below is of a Yellow-Head Blackbird (who thinks of these clever names?). I am showing it to you before and after cropping to give you an idea of how you can seem to move right onto the bird for a close-up. I was not very close at all.

Have a great time.