Customer Reviews

The Birdwatcher's Guide to Digital Photography

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4 star:		(1)
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Intended audience for this book can be easily understood from the title: birdwatchers with digital cameras. Book has three sections of roughly equal length devoted to (1) equipment, (2) photographing birds, and (3) digital photo editing. The excellent bird photos throughout the book include identifications of the birds, where the shot was taken, and the camera settings. Although the overwhelming majority of the photos in the book seem to have been taken with 500mm lenses, Tipling's message is not simply "get big lenses and get close". He seems to have traveled everywhere in the world to shoot birds, there's good info here about photographing birds in your backyard and in the city. One of the best things about the book is that it's up to date. It's all about digital photography, for starters. He talks about both digital SLRs and compact cameras and does not turn up his nose at the latter. He discusses digiscoping, for example - a way for compact digital cameras to get great shots with the help of birding scopes. In the section on software, he's aware of Adobe Lightroom, which as of today (1-27-07) is still in public beta. I would have been happy perhaps with more pages on photographing birds and fewer pages on post-processing on the camera, but his section on photo editing is geared specifically to editing photographs of birds. All in all, I have found the book to be informative, suggestive (his photos make me want to do the same thing), and enjoyable.

Oh, the book has a forward by John Fitzpatrick, director of the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology and blurb from David Sibley himself on the back!

This book was exactly what I hoped it would be. It started out with explainations of dslr cameras and associated equipment, explained terms like ISO and aperature, and then went into example of settings for different bird photograph scenereos. easy to read, concise, great photos.

Tipling is a very well-regarded nature photographer. In this Guide, he devotes brief - sometimes, very brief - chapters to each of the issues a nature photographer faces in trying for prosumer and professional avian photography. Three large sections discuss Equipment, Photographing Birds and Digital Photo Editing.

It's an impossible challenge to cram a thorough discussion of all of the issues for each of those sections into a mere 144 pages. The result is that some chapters are only a page long and do little more than tell the reader the subject. Tripod heads, an important part of an avian photographer's toolbox, and telephoto lenses, a critical part, get two pages each. While brevity is a virtue, this might be just a little too brief. And it's compounded by photos that illustrate Tipling's points.

It's also impossible to stay current in an area that's developing as quickly as digital photography and digital processing. This was published in 2006, written in late 2005. It's three generations of cameras out of date. Three versions of Photoshop out of date.

As a checklist of things the aspiring avian photographer needs to know, if has real value. But as a guide to the current state of those important things, it's more than a little dated.

I'm a novice bird photographer. Having received a nice SLR camera for Christmas, I purchased two camera-specific manuals to help learn how to use it. They did indeed improve camera usage, but general picture-taking explanations weren't enough in helping me improve birding photography skills. This little book can be bought used for under $1 on Amazon, yet the tips I've gleaned from it are already invaluable. Mr. Tipling's advice is easy to understand, and he addresses all birding photography issues I initially had problems with. Dated or not, it's worth a look if you are new to digital photography or have any interest in birding photography.