Bill Coster Newsletter 7

 I was looking forward to see Richard Revels show on the Falklands at the LVNP in January, but a phone call from a friend alerted me to possible problems on the roads. I typed in Essex Travel on the internet and virtually every road that I use between my home and Waltham Abbey was closed due to accidents or overturned lorries. Needless to say I didn’t go!

 Hopefully we won’t get more gale force winds on the 15^th February when I give my first ever audio visual presentation on Antarctica! I hope to see many of you there. Even if you are not a LVNP member, you are welcome to come along. The meeting is held in Victoria Hall, which is in a road called Greenyard, not far from Waltham Abbey itself.

 I notice some email addresses on my mailing list suddenly become invalid. This is usually because the person concerned has changed their ISP (Internet Service Provider) and with it their email address. The problem is that nobody knows your new email address! This is the reason I have a hotmail account, which is completely independent of any ISP, so for example when I switched from AOL dial up to Talktalk broadband my email address stayed the same. I have got a talktalk email address, but I never use it. If you do change your email address, then you will have to let me know, or you will no longer receive my newsletters.

 After a miserable winter so far, February started with a few days of blue sky weather. We set of for Slimbridge early on Saturday morning with clear skies all along the route. As we approached slimbridge though, the conditions suddenly turned foggy and as we pulled up in the car park at 8.20 it was very bad indeed. This is a big drawback of slimbridge and we have had previous days ruined by fog. It didn’t clear until just after lunch, but then we did get some good pics of the Bewick’s Swans and other wildfowl. The next morning was better with no fog, but their was some high white cloud, but we had a pretty good day. The WWT reserves are good places to photograph birds, but with a little effort they could be made so much better for photographers. They spend tens of thousands on double glazed, centrally heated hides for people that want to watch birds through glass – just like on the telly! A few strategically placed hides around the main lake that would take big telephotos would make life so much easier for photographers.

 We woke on Monday to heavy cloud which was predicted to last all day, so we set off north for Martin Mere, another WWT reserve that I’d always wanted to visit. We got their before lunch and the sky was clear blue. We couldn’t have asked for better conditions. Unfortunately the reserve was very disappointing. There is a huge long hide along the side of the mere itself, which has hundreds of Whooper Swans and other wildfowl. The problem is that the water is covered with feathers and unattractive and there are so many bids that they all get in each others way. By midday the whole area is heavily sidelit which gradually gets worse as the afternoon progresses. There were only very distant views of the many pink feet geese that the place is famous for.

 The wildfowl collection is not very good and is housed in rather small closed in ponds that are surrounded by trees that produce lots of shade, unlike Slimbridge where the ponds are very open. There were also very few wild birds around the pens, unlike Slimbridge where you can feed a variety of completely wild ducks that you couldn’t get within a 100 yards out on the marsh.

 Despite the next day being sunny, after a quick walk around the reserve with little in the way of pics, we headed home. At least I’d checked it out, but I won’t be returning.

Birds Illustrated Magazine

Birds’s Illustrated Magazine now has a website, which is www.birdsillustrated.com. Don’t forget, you can’t be serious about bird photography if you don’t subscribe to this excellent magazine, that showcases the very best in bird photography.

Antarctica  Pics

This month I thought I’d share some pics other than the Emperors, that I took on the Emperor Penguin trip, last November. All pictures are hand held (I didn’t take a tripod with me on this trip – it would have just got in the way).

Through the Pack Ice

 Taken as we moved slowly through the pack ice in he La Maire Channel

 EOS 1D mark II – 20mm lens. 1/2500^th sec @ f5.6, ASA 400

Snow Petrel and Ice

 I really like the backdrop in this image, which shows the Snow Petrel in it’s true envirnoment

EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO + 1.4x. 1/1000^th @ f5.6, ASA 400

Balancing Act

 We visited a Chinstrap colony on a sunny day.

 EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO + 1.4x. 1/1250^th @ f10, ASA 400

Preening

 Penguin Colonies are very crowded and messy, so I concentrated on close ups

 EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO + 1.4x  1/800^th @ f11, 400 ASA

Pintado Coming in to Land

 Taken in dreadful conditions that would have rendered film useless.

 EOS 1D mark II – 70-210mm + 2x  1/400^th @f5.6

Antarctic Petrel Slow Pan

 I experimented with slow shutter speeds to convey movement

 EOS 1D mark II – 400mm DO + 1.4x  1/30^th @ f11, 400 ASA

Computer Bits

 Cards and Readers

 Cards

With Sandisk having recently introduced yet another faster card (The Extreme IV range), I thought I’d try and see what difference the claimed speeds of these cards make when used in real life. The speed of the card is supposed to represent how fast the camera can write to it and the quicker the camera can offload the images to the card, the quicker you will be able to shoot more.

 When you take a picture, the camera stores the information in the camera itself in what is known as the buffer. This is written out to the card you are using in your camera. When you shoot continuously, you are filling the buffer in the camera faster than the camera can write to the card. When the buffer fills up, the camera stops and you can’t take any more pictures until the buffer has written an image to the card and then effectively deletes the image from the buffer, allowing you to take another picture to replace it. This is a rough explanation, but it is enough for our purposes.

 I don’t have one of the latest cards, but I have accumulated a few different types over the last couple of years, so I thought I’d set up a test and measure just what the difference was between the various types and whether the hype was true or not. With the awful cloudy January weather, I had plenty of time to experiment.

 I used the 1Ds to do the testing as due to the large RAW file sizes (I only shoot RAW), the number of exposures would be less than other cameras, so it would be easier to count them! I set the camera up on a tripod and focused on the garden. I them loaded the card I was testing and held the button down on continuous shooting at the fastest motordrive rate until it stopped, counting the number of shots it took in this period. I also took the time that I started shooting and then recorded the time that the red light went out on the camera, which indicated when it had finished processing the images and had cleared the buffer. The results were as follows:

Card Make	Typ e	No in Burst	Time to Process
Sandisk Ultra II	SD	10	20 Seconds
Sandisk Ultra II	CF	10	30 Seconds
Sandisk Extreme III	CF	10	22 Seconds
Lexar 80x	CF	10	28 Seconds
Delkin Pro	CF	10	48 Seconds

 So what conclusions can we draw from this?

 Firstly, I was a little surprised that the Number of images in a single burst was identical, regardless of what card was used. Interestingly Canon claim that the 1Ds Mark II is capable of only 6 RAW images in a single burst, which is clearly an underestimation.

 The Time to Process did show up the differences in the cards though and the poor old Delkin Pro was the slowest card by miles at 48 seconds. This card has gone to the back of the queue if I’m shooting action. When shooting landscapes or macro though, this processing time would be unlikely to affect you.

 The fastest card was the Sandisk Ultra II SD card, which amazingly was faster than the Sandisk Extreme III CF card. I’ve only just started using the SD card. I bumped into Alan Williams in Kent a month or so ago and he was using an SD card as well as a CF card, switching from one to the other when the first one run out. This seemed like a good idea, so I bought a 2gb SD card and tried it out. I think it’s only the EOS professional cameras (1D range) that can use both types of card though. The only problem is that they are so tiny they can easily be lost and a bit fiddly to handle – especially if it’s freezing cold!

 Despite Sandisk having the reputation as being the fastest cards, it took them a while to overtake the old Lexar 80x and only managed this with the introduction of the Extreme III range. As for the difference between the Sandisk Extreme III and Ultra II CF cards, you’ll have to decide for yourselves whether it is worth the extra pounds to save that 8 seconds!

 Although I’ve measured the time it takes to clear the buffer in this test, in practice this would mean that the slower the card, the longer you would have to wait until you could take the next picture. Once the buffer was full this would mean a hefty 5 second interval between each shot on the Delkin and just 2 seconds on the Sandisk SD card.

 All this rather begs the question as to why Canon simply don’t provide a huge buffer on their cameras, capable of taking at least half a gigabyte of data. There may well be technical reasons why not, but I’m sure in time the buffers will get bigger and bigger and the cameras won’t stop so often.

 Card Readers

Once I bought the SD card I had to buy a new Card Reader as my old Lexar USB 2.0 CompactFlash Reader only handles CF cards.

 I bought the new Sandisk Extreme USB 2.0 Card Reader which claimed to be the fastest card reader around, but more importantly from my point of view, would rea both CF and SD cards.

 By the way, when buying a card reader, always check that it says USB 2.0. If it is a USB device and doesn’t say USB 2.0, then it will be USB 1, which will take forever and a day to download anything. Avoid these at all costs!

 I filled a 2gb CF card and downloaded all of the images using Downloader Pro and my Lexar CF reader. It always estimates 6 minutes, but I timed it and found that it took 4 minutes 45 seconds to download all of the cards contents. I then took the same card with the same data on it and downloaded it again using my new Sandisk Extreme card reader and this time it took 3 minutes 10 seconds – a significant improvement. Whe I’m on a major photographic shoot I tend to download twice a day and when you’ve got a lot of cards to process the downloading seems to last forever. Any improvement in download times has to be good news and as I always download before lunch and dinner it means we’ll be able to eat earlier as well!

 If anyone has experience of the Sandisk Extreme IV, or other cards, then I’d be happy to pass these on via a future edition of this newsletter. The more we share our experiences, the better it is for all of us in this new fangled digital world!

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