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Bill Coster Newsletter 6Well after the Antarctica problems, things are now getting back to normal and my insurance company has replaced al my gear. All I’m waiting for now is some decent weather to get out and use it! It seems to be cloudy almost every day. The met office kept predicting good spells of sunny weather, but they never arrived. When we did get some high pressure settle over us it brought dense fog instead of the expected clear skies. Now I remember why I travel abroad so much, although with the fog causing chaos at heathrow, that wouldn’t have helped much either. I had some good news in that I managed to win a section of the International Wildbird Photographer this year. This is one up on last year when I was runner up in the digital image category. The section I won was UK Birds, with this picture of a Ringed Plover running across a beach in Shetland. A little ironic really as my Shetland trip was the first I’d done in the UK for many years! Anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen it in Birdwatching Magazine (which didn’t do a very good job in printing it), here it is.
I thought the winning entry of the 2 Godwits fighting in this years competition was a brilliant picture and a deserving winner, but once again I was mystified by the judges decisions in some (not all) of the other categories as I’m sure many other photographers were and the cry of ‘how could they chose that over my entry’ is probably going on up and down the land right now! Apparently I’ve run a Canon EOS 30D camera, but it hasn’t turned up yet. When it does I’ll be looking to sell it, as although it’s a very good camera, I use the EOS 1 series of cameras, so don’t really want it. I reckon £100 cheaper that the A J Purdy price would be good value for a completely unopened, brand new camera body.
For SaleI still have the following Canon EOS equipment for sale. 20mm Lens f2.8 - £240 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 January LVNP meeting and I can bring the items along, but I will only do this if you email me. Otherwise, I can supply by Registered Post (or whatever they call in nowadays) at cost.
Birds Illustrated MagazineTo subscribe contact Buckingham Press on 01733 561739. Mention my name and they will send you a free sample copy.
Emperor PicsHere are a few images of the Emperor Penguins that proved so costly. I have now added a gallery on my website, so if you want to see some more you can visit the website or use this direct link to the Emperor Gallery: http://www.billcoster.com/html/index15.html
Crossing the Ice I stopped down try and get as greater depth of field as possible as the surroundings were just as important as the birds EOS 1Ds mark II – 100-400mm lens. 1/640th sec @ f1/16 – one of the last pictures I ever took with this particular camera!
Travelling over Snow The Emperor’s often toboggan along on their bellies when travelling long distances over the snowy terrain EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO + 1.4x. 1/1000th @ f8
Adults with Chick
The Classic Emperor Pose EOS 1Ds mark II – 100-400mm lens. 1/640th sec @ f1/16
Adults in Snow Flurry A favourite image, taken in bad conditions EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO. 1/500th @ f16
The Conductor There’s no getting away from it, the chicks were so cute… EOS 1Ds mark II – 100-400mm. 1/500th @f16 2007 Bill Coster Photo Tour – More Pictures for your Pound. Pantanal - £2,800 plus flight – 4th to 21st 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.
Computer Bits Laptops As I’ve just replaced my broken laptop with a new model, I thought that this would make a good subject for my Computer Bits section, which I know many of you find the most useful bit of the newsletter. The first question is why do you want a laptop? For me I only really use the laptop when I’m away from home, as I have a desktop PC at home. I find it essential for downloading and reviewing my digital images when I’m travelling and most important of all, for saving the images I want. I know that many people use these small devices that have an LCD screen for this purpose, but these have several drawbacks, as follows: The screens are too small to judge critical sharpness You would need at least two of them, as putting all you images on one electronic device is asking for trouble With 2 of these devices, you would have to download and delete unwanted images twice – one on each machine They are very expensive for what they are They use their own special software to control the loading and manipulation of images – never a good thing On the plus side they are small and light. With a laptop, you can load whatever editing software you want and you can make as many backups as you want, either to DVD or external drives. You can also access the internet when away from home (quite a few motels in the US now have wireless networks for guests) and store many other useful notes and other software (such as image recovery etc), which make a laptop so much more flexible. Laptop Types I’ve categorised laptops into 3 main types, although there will always be some crossover between them. This is a bit arbitrary, but in general tems it will help to understand why the prices are so different. 1. Big, Cheap and Heavy These are the ones that seem so cheap and often have high specifications. Try picking one up though! They typically weigh from 4kg to 6kg. The reason why such high spec machines are so cheap is that they are made from desktop PC parts, not parts specifically designed for laptops. This means that the parts are much cheaper and much heavier. If you want a laptop instead of a PC at home, then one of these boys will fit the bill. 2. Medium Weight This is what I had before. Mine was a Sony Vaio and had a 60gb harddrive and a built it DVD writer and weighed in at 2.3kg. his is the one that packed up after a I managed to drop it just a little bit. At the time I bought it (It cost about £1100 2 years ago), it was one of the lightest machines around. It had a full size 14 inch screen (The screen size is measured along the diagonal, just like TVs). 3. Lightweight This is the category of my replacement laptop, which is a LenovoThinkpad. For those of you that have never heard of Lenovo and are therefore (understandably) wary of it, Lenovo are the rebranded IBM laptops, so have a good pedigree. The main reason for choosing this laptop is that it weighs only 1.3kg! This is actually even lighter, when you consider that the power pack is built into the laptop and is therefore included in the weight, unlike the sony which had a separate and quite heavy power pack. It also has an 80gb hard drive. There are two downsides to this. Firstly the screen is only 12 inches, rather than the 14 inch screen I had before and this will affect judging critical sharpness, Secondly, it doesn’t have a built in DVD writer. This is a problem as a CD/DVD drive is really useful for making additional backups and loading software etc. A solution is a hand though as Plextor produce an external DVD writer that weighs only 250g and is powered through the USB port of the laptop. The latter is really important as it means that you don’t need to plug in the DVD writer to the mains. When you attach it to the laptop through the USB port, it gets it’s power through this port, so you don’t need yet another mains cable and power pack. Most of the UK retailers are waiting for stock to arrive at the moment, so I can’t get hold of one, but I’ll get one in the next week or so. The weight is key for me though as I travel a lot by air and with the silly ban on separate laptop bags still in place, the reduced weight (and size), makes it much easier to slip the laptop in the camera bag. I don’t use the DVD all of the time, so having this separate and reducing the weight is a good thing and if pushed I can always put this in the hold luggage or in my pocket. There is one other big advantage of buying a Lenovo over other manufacturers, which is that they give a 3 year warranty, as opposed to 1 year by most (if not all) of the other manufacturers which is pretty important when spending around a thousand on a high tech piece of equipment. Sony do a similar lightweight machine, but it’s quite a bit more expensive and only that 1 year cover. Like everything else, buying a laptop is always a compromise with price, screen size and weight being the most important factors. I don’t need the most powerful machine as I don’t do any heavy processing on it, so this isn’t really a factor. All I want is something that will enable me to view, delete (I do a lot of that!) and save images.
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