Bill Coster Newsletter 5

Well it’s been a little while since my last Newsletter, but I’ve only just returned from Antarctica, where I was photographing the Emperor Penguins and before that I was working hard on my Antarctica presentation for the LVNP next Feb.

 Although I did get some good Emperor pics, the trip can only be described as a disaster! I’ve spent years travelling the world and apart from a few delays here and there, I’ve never had any real problems. On this trip however, I think it fair to say that everything that could go wrong did go wrong………

 When I turned up at Gatwick Airport for my 17:35 flight to Madrid (to catch the flight to Buenos Aires), I was surprised to see that the Aerolineas Argentinas desk was unattended. When I enquired at the information desk as to when it would be open, they informed me that the flight had been rescheduled to 09:55 that morning and so had left! I booked directly with the airline and they had both my telephone number and email address and hadn’t bothered to tell me about the change. What to do? I managed to buy a ticket on an Easyjet flight to Madrid and after collecting my luggage and clearing customs, I was the last person to check in the flight to Buenos Aires. I shouldn’t have bothered!

 On the 7^th November I managed to drop my laptop a few inches onto the desk in the cabin and it stopped working (I’ve since had it checked and it’s probably terminal). Later that day I took my camera gear swimming in freezing cold water and my EOS 1Ds II, 100-400 Lens and brand new 24-105 Lens were rendered unusable (There are in fact write offs). About £7,000 worth of camera gear. Fortunately, unlike the previous day, I decided to leave my backup camera (Canon 1D II) in the cabin and not bring it with me, otherwise this would have been ruined as well.

 Without a mid range zoom I was stuck, but with amazing generosity a fellow Canon professional (whom I’d never met before), Frank Lukasseck from Germany, lent me a 70-200 f2.8 zoom. The next day I was back out there photographing, using my 1.4x and 2x converters to give me a good range of focal lengths.

 Without a laptop I couldn’t download, but Joe Van Os let me use his laptop to download and do a quick edit and I was then able to save my pics to the two external hard drives I carry with me. At least I could carry on, but I missed my wideangle zoom. At the last moment before I left for the airport I had quickly grabbed my 24-85mm zoom and thrown it in my hold luggage as a spare (just in case). I was now pleased I made this decision, but on retrieving the lens I discovered in my haste I had grabbed the 20mm instead by mistake – you couldn’t make it up!

 When I finally arrived home at Gatwick I rang my taxi service to make sure they were waiting for me (I use them all the time and they have never let me down), only to find that they although they received the booking, they didn’t put it in their pick up book so they weren’t there! I suggested it would be a good idea if they left for Gatwick immediately – they apologetically agreed.

 I wandered over to pick up my luggage and (you guessed it) – it wasn’t there! Deep joy. I went to the lost luggage desk and the guy managed to find it on the system – it was still in Buenos Aires. He remarked how calm I was about my lost luggage, but I explained that given the trip I’d just had, this was simply a minor inconvenience. It was delivered to my home 3 days later.

Handluggage Restrictions

This trip was my first experience of travelling with the new restrictions and although things were not as bad as I thought, I have to say that the new rules are a complete farce and do no absolutely nothing for security. There were a number of women stopped at security because they had a very small carry on bag and a handbag – two items are not allowed. If they had put both on these bags in a larger bag (even a carrier bag) they would have had no problems – utter nonsense. Without a separate laptop bag I had to put the laptop in my camera bag. This slowed things up considerably at the security check as you have to take your laptop out to be x-rayed on it’s own. This would have been much quicker to achieve had I been allowed the laptop bag as well.

On the plus side, I had a few electronic items in my Domke Jacket and this was allowed through. I also had a separate trolley for my camera bag which when attached would have made it too big for the ‘size bins’ which are now all over the airport. The security guys didn’t bother about this. If they had disallowed the trolley the situation really would have been ridiculous, as I would have left it at security, walked a few yards and bought another one at the luggage shop and would have been completely legal!

 The biggest problem with these ridiculous rules arises when travelling on an airline that has strict weight limits on hand luggage. When I flew to Australia on Emirates, their weight limit on the hand luggage was 8kg – and they weighed it. This did not cause a problem though as I was able to take a laptop bag and a small camera bag in addition to the 8kg hand luggage, as well as anything I could get in my Domke jacket (which was quite a lot). If you combine the small weight limit with a single item, then you are in trouble. You either have to risk putting precious gear in the hold or don’t travel. There is one other alternative which I haven’t looked into yet, which is to travel overland to a more civilised country (like Holland or France) and fly from there. How practical this would be I’m not sure, but it would seem to solve the problem. On the way back you can fly into the UK as the one piece rule doesn’t apply for inbound flights.

For Sale

I have the following Canon EOS equipment for sale.

 20mm Lens f2.8              -                  £240

 28-135mm IS Lens          -                  £220

 20D Body                       -                  £440

 All the equipment is in excellent condition. The 20D has hardly been used. I bought it new as a back up body for my EOS 1D Mark II, but used it only rarely. After I purchased the 1Ds II, I didn’t need it any longer. If anyone is interested I am hoping to be at the December LVNP meeting and I can bring the items along. Otherwise, I can supply by Registered Post (or whatever they call in nowadays) at cost.

Birds Illustrated Magazine

To subscribe contact Buckingham Press on 01733 561739. Mention my name and they will send you a free sample copy.

Plants Abstracts

I haven’t got any pics ready from the emperor trip yet as I’ve got days and days of processing before these are ready, so I’ve included a few abstracts of flowers and leaves which I’ve been working on over the Summer. These may appeal to the everyone, but I enjoy making these images which concentrate on the very basics of nature photography, namely colour, shape and form. All were taken using a 100mm macro lens.

Leaf Veins

Yellow Dahlia

Orange and Pink Dahlia

Red Dahlia

Pandorea jasminoides

Pelagonium Leaf

2007 Bill Coster Photo Tour – More Pictures for your Pound.

Pantanal - £2,800 plus flight – 4^th to 21^st August 2007  - 3 places left

This famous wetland region in Brazil has a riot of birds and other wildlife to photograph. There is a reasonable chance of Jaguar at a regular spot for this elusive species, Giant Otter should be quite easy as should Hyacinth Macaw and a wealth of other birds, including many species of Hummingbird, Guans, Storks, Herons etc etc. Should be a great experience.

 Extramadura - £1,300 plus flight – 10^th to18^th April 2007

Last chance to book this tour as all participants must be registered by the end of the year to allow time for the photographic permits to be applied for.

  Computer Bits

 Naming Your Digital Files

Just a short bit about digital in this newsletter, but one that is quite important – naming of your images.

 Whilst on the Antarctica trip I noticed the many and varied way which people named their images and most of these naming conventions that people use will result in a bit of a mess later on. Even in some books on digital photography the suggested naming conventions are very poor.

 Firstly with digital it is essential that every image has a unique name. I strongly suggest that this name not contain dates, species or locations. It should be a simple code that has no hidden meaning. A number is ideal, but numbers have a habit of being truncated when used on there own so file number 000025 is often shown by lots of software as 25 which will cause confusion at some stage. To avoid this I name my images using a 2 character alpha, followed by 6 character numeric as follows:

 BI002345

 The BI in this case stands for Birds and I have other prefixes for other subject categories like Landscape, Mammal etc. Strictly speaking, even including a category in the filename is not really ‘correct’, but I find this useful and I’m aware of the compromise I’ve made. It also allows a million images in each category, so that should be enough!

 The IPTC data is the correct place to record the name and location of the subject, not the filename. This may all seem a bit abstract if you are not familiar with working with computerised data, but the two most common problems when dealing with computer systems are caused by record names not being simple and meaningless and fields that seemed large enough when the system was developed, but have become too small to accommodate the numbers now required. If you allow 5 numbers now, that means you can only have 99,999 images. This may seem a huge amount now, but you have to think ahead and it’s surprising how quickly you build up pictures.

 Now that everything is digital it is very easy to keep track of your pictures and you can keep records of all the images in your system and what you are doing with them. Using breezebrowser it is takes very little effort to extract huge amounts of data about each image and put it in a spreadsheet. This way you can keep a list of all your pictures by your filenames and what is on each of them. I’ve taken this one step further and designed a database to store this information. I can now run reports to analyse sales, submissions etc etc.

If you are currently not using a similar naming convention to the one I’ve described, then I would urge you to change now. You may have thousands of images to change, but it’s better to bite the bullet now as the problem will only get worse as you get more pictures. If you don’t it will end in tears…………

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