Photo Safaris By Region AFRICA - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Namibia—Land of the Himba - Cape Town—Photo Tour for Women ANTARCTICA - Ultimate Antarctica ASIA - Angkor Wat & Bagan - China's Winter Tigers & Giant Pandas - Japan's Winter Wildlife - India—The Palace on Wheels - Snow Monkeys & Giant Pandas - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Great Rivers & Mountains of China & Tibet - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival EUROPE - Britain's Winter Birdlife - Eclectic Holland - Wildlife of Hungary & Transylvania - Transylvania—Romania of Myth & Legend - Venice - Tuscany - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Provence - Spitsbergen—The Pack Ice Voyage - Ultimate Puffins - Albania, Macedonia & Montenegro NORTH AMERICA - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Horses & Icons of the Wild West in Winter - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - Great Smoky Mountains - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Predatory Animals of North America - Action & Adventure Sports - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Glacier National Park Field Workshop - Denali National Park in Autumn - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - South Dakota Wildlife—Bison Roundup & Mount Rushmore - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women PACIFICA - Papua New Guinea SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA - Patagonia' Mountain Landscapes - Baja California—Whales, Wildlife & Wilderness - Easter Island & Machu Picchu - Mexico's Colonial Heartland Photo Safaris By Date JANUARY - Ultimate Antarctica - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Angkor Wat & Bagan - Britain's Winter Birdlife FEBRUARY - China's Winter Tigers & Giant Pandas - Horses & Icons of the Wild West in Winter - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Japan's Winter Wildlife MARCH - Baja California—Whales, Wildlife & Wilderness - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - India—The Palace on Wheels APRIL - Nature & Digital Photo Seminar with John Shaw - Patagonia' Mountain Landscapes - Eclectic Holland - Great Smoky Mountains - Wildlife of Hungary & Transylvania MAY - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Transylvania—Romania of Myth & Legend - Venice - Tuscany - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Snow Monkeys & Giant Pandas JUNE - Predatory Animals of North America in Spring - Action & Adventure Sports - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Provence JULY - Spitsbergen—The Pack Ice Voyage - Ultimate Puffins AUGUST - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Glacier National Park Field Workshop - Denali National Park in Autumn SEPTEMBER - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Great Rivers & Mountains of China & Tibet - Albania, Macedonia & Montenegro - Namibia—Land of the Himba - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival - Predatory Animals of North America in Autumn - South Dakota Wildlife—Bison Roundup & Mount Rushmore OCTOBER - Papua New Guinea - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - Nature & Digital Photo Seminars with John Shaw - Easter Island & Machu Picchu - Mexico's Colonial Heartland NOVEMBER - Wet & Wild—Andean Condors and Iquazú Falls DECEMBER - No tours scheduled for December 2008 JANUARY 2009 - Cape Town—Photo Tour for Women

		Ultimate Antarctica January 5–February 1, 2008 Digital photography seems to be the rage these days, or at least the major topic of conversation among many of the photographers I meet. There appears to be a general acceptance that the digital world is coming and that it will not be long before digital imagery becomes the standard, or at least an alternative, for many types of photography. Indeed, studio portraiture is rapidly going in that direction, giving clients the ability to choose an image seconds after a shooting session. With image manipulation becoming so easy, corrections of blemishes, flaws, etc. are simple. For nature photographers, the questions concerning digital photography revolve around two issues. Is the quality there and are markets accepting, or will they accept, digital images? Some professional photographers we know have converted to digital and are selling their articles and images electronically. Some photographers and their markets are, I believe, focused around articles with text and, since images are generally scanned for most magazine publications, jpeg or tiff file submissions make sense. One magazine we write for requests e-mail submission of articles, usually via an attachment, but the editor still prefers the images that will illustrate these articles to be actual slides. While they scan these images in for publication, they do not yet want electronic submissions. My biggest concern about converting to all digital, at this time, is I suspect that my editorial markets are not set up for electronic submissions. This is only a guess, but consider the following. Many photo editors have secretaries who open the photo submission packages, and sometimes give the submission a quick once-over to see if it is worth passing on to the editor. To do so, perhaps he or she looks at the images on a light board or merely holds the slide sheet up to the light. Dont laugh a book publisher I deal with does exactly that for sub editors! Now, to preview a submission, this same secretary will have to open an attachment and wait for the computer to do its thing, or insert a CD disk and cruise through it to look at the images. The same holds true for the editor, assuming that the secretary passes the CD on. Then there is the potential issue of ownership, if an image is kept. Does the editor keep the CD or copy the image onto a zip drive, CD or hard drive and create a photo file of your images? How are those copied images identified? By subject? By photographer? A perfect copy is now in their possession a positive if theyre going to use it (and no sweat off a photographers back if not), but it does raise questions about keeping track of images on the photographers and the editors part. Im sure these issues will eventually be addressed and electronic submissions will become the norm. However, at this point, I dont think a lot of the major markets are ready for it. Editors today might wish to see a jpeg or CD to get an idea of what you have, but once that disposable image is seen, they still want to see the slide. I think it might be imprudent to shoot everything, at this time, solely on digital. Im afraid there might be a reduction in potential markets. Now, thats the negative. There are a heck of a lot of positives! As almost any digital photographer will tell you, there is a huge savings on film costs. They also know how much space is saved when traveling, as the huge bulk of film is replaced by one or two memory cards and some type of digital storage device for saving the good images before erasing the card and starting again. One of the beautiful things of digital photography is the fact that a memory card can be reused virtually forever. When the card is filled, the images recorded are transferred and stored elsewhere, and the card is erased to be reused. Imagine if we could reuse our film in the film cartridges! There are a variety of digital storage devices available, from your desktop or laptop computer to image-storage devices like the Digital Wallet. Image storage devices may or may not give you the ability to view your images, depending upon the product, and probably will not give you any capability to manipulate those images. To do that youll need your computer and an image manipulation program. Adobe Photoshop is probably the industry standard for this, but there are others, including stripped down versions of Photoshop that may be supplied with your digital camera. The Canon D30 I borrowed from Canon had a great program, called PhotoStitch, that I used to make no-brainer panoramic images. While Photoshop allows you to do high quality panoramas, you have to know Photoshop. For PhotoStitch, I followed the cameras instructions and was doing panoramas within an hour. And they looked good and were fun to do! Every photographer waits in heady anticipation to have his or her film processed, hoping to see great shots, worried perhaps about the exposure or the focus or the framing. With a digital camera, that anticipation and wait are reduced to milliseconds! Theres a lot to be said for instant gratification, and thats exactly what you get when youre shooting video. Recently I had a chance to use a Canon D30 for a month-long shoot of hummingbirds in Arizona. Originally I had planned to merely use the camera to test the lighting ratios and to double-check the setups before I shot real film. The camera excelled at this, and I was able to correct for bad shadows, misaimed flashes, etc. But then I made a mistake I started shooting hummingbirds with the camera. Why was this a mistake? Because I had a very hard time putting the digital camera down and going back to film! It was almost addicting, being able to see exactly what I captured within seconds of making the shot. If I didnt like the image, Id hit the erase button and the bad image was gone! I also made an amazing discovery well, at least a personal discovery. Ive always filmed flying hummingbirds using manual flash techniques, which allowed me to control the flash duration and the exposure. With TTL, I was afraid the exposure might be incorrect if the bird didnt fill much of the frame, and the flash duration might be too slow to stop the birds wings. By shooting digital, I was able to confirm that the TTL flash exposure actually worked and, depending upon the aperture I used, the flash duration was fast enough to freeze the birds wings. After confirming that the TTL exposure worked, I confidently switched to my film camera and shot hummers with TTL flash for the first time. The results were terrific! There were some other really nice features that I loved with the camera. The D30 is lightweight and was rather effortless to carry about. Also, the image recording area is slightly smaller than it is with film, so a lens has a built-in 1.6x multiplication factor. Thus a 300mm f/2.8 for a 35mm camera becomes a 480mm f/2.8 lens on the digital camera! Add a 2x converter and you have a 960mm f/5.6 lens, with all the focusing points of the D30 active! Of course, this 1.6x magnification can work against you, as a 20mm wide-angle lens (with a 35mm) becomes a 32mm wide-angle, so super-wide-angle perspectives are difficult to do. Since most of my work involves macro or telephoto lenses, I loved the built-in magnification. During our stay we had a full moon, and I decided to give the D30 a real workout. I mounted a 400mm f/2.8 lens with a 1.4x tele-converter and two 2x tele-converters, using 12mm extension tubes between the converters. This combo gave me a magnification of 2,240mm, but I had an additional 1.6x magnification with the digital camera. Factoring that in, I had a total of 3,584mm! The image was so large that only a portion of the moon was within my viewfinder, and I lost a lot of light due to all the converters I had used. So, I raised the ISO to 800 and, without the benefit of mirror lockup or an electronic cable release to dampen vibrations, I made an exposure. The first image looked dark on my viewing screen, so I lowered my shutter speed and shot again. The second was right on. When I downloaded the image to my laptop I saw that I should have used the mirror-lockup feature and a cable release to reduce image shake. Since I didnt, I used Photoshop and one of the sharpening filters to sharpen the image. It worked, and the image looked great. Raising the ISO whenever I had to was another feature I savored. With a digital camera you have the choice of several ISO settings for any given exposure. The default ISO setting on the Canon D30 was ISO 100 (it is ISO 200 for the Nikon D1), but the ISO settings range doubles to 200, 400, 800, and 1600. When I needed to, I could switch to ISO 400 or 800 to record something in low light when I was merely trying to document a scene. For example, I wanted to document the clutter of the interior of our cabin and, using my TTL flash bounced off the white ceiling, I had sufficient light to record the chaos at a smaller aperture to keep the whole mess in focus. With film, if you need a faster ISO film, you can either push the film presently in the camera or change the film to one with a faster ISO rating. If you decide to push your film mid-roll, youll underexpose the images you made at the original ISO setting. If you dump the roll and reload with a new, faster film, youll have to label the roll and mark the frame number if you plan to reload it later. Then, youll have to be sure you advance the film with a lens cap on, otherwise youll double-expose the film as you advance! I had an opportunity to shoot a black bear that appeared near our cabin one day as I was filming hummingbirds. The bear was in the shade and I only had a 70-200mm lens along, but with the built-in 1.6x multiplication, and jacking my ISO to 800, I had an OK record shot of the bear. Id have had nothing had I had my 35mm along at the time. If youre into record keeping, the camera records the data for each image, including the aperture and shutter speed and the time and date. This information could be useful on trips if you failed to keep notes on what was shot when. By checking these records you could at least determine where you were when you shot a particular image. Despite the negatives I offered in introducing digital, the positive aspects of the camera far exceeded any drawbacks. And remember, the negatives I see are those imposed by the editorial markets I deal with. Once digital photography becomes widely accepted by these markets, and they most certainly eventually will, Ill probably think long and hard about shooting film. But what do I do until then? Im getting a digital camera! While Im not going to abandon film shooting just yet, I see several wonderful advantages to shooting digital. As I said, it is a wonderful tool for checking flash exposures, either in the studio or in the field. But that may not be enough of a reason for you. With digital, I can capture images I could not before. I envision carrying my digital camera as a spare camera body, using it when I cannot obtain an image with my low ISO film-loaded cameras. Imagine having a spotted owl or a cougar or a leopard thats too far away for your longest lens, with light too low for your ISO 100 speed film. By switching to my digital camera, Ill have an additional 1.6x magnification, without any loss of light, and the ability to switch to whatever ISO film speed I required. By doing so, Ill get the shot. Now, granted, at this point in time I might have a limited number of markets where I can use that image, but if I store it away, chances are those markets will exist at a later date. For now, at the very least, I could use that image on my website, or to make computer-generated prints, or in PowerPoint presentations on my computer or via a digital projector. The image wont go to waste while Im waiting for the editorial market to catch up with the technology now available and, in the meantime, Ill be making images Id otherwise have missed. There are several great cameras out there, and more to come. Like computers, what you buy this year may be replaced by a cheaper, better model a year later, but thats the way of technology. If youre thinking of going digital, nows the time. Its great!

	Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc. P.O. Box 655, Vashon Island, Washington USA 98070 Phone: (206) 463-5383   Fax: (206) 463-5484    Email: info@photosafaris.com Copyright © 2008, Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc.