Okay, so if you’re not a photographer you might want to skip this post. I thought I’d blog about the behind the scenes stuff on my recent Borneo trip, specifically relating to the photos, a subject that might be pretty boring for those of you who aren’t photographers. It’s the sort of stuff I love to read about, but be warned, I might be n3rding it up over the next few paragraphs.
How many photos?
Over 3 weeks I took 3,559 photos with my SLR and a further 355 with my point and shoot (mostly failed underwater shots). When I returned it took me about a day to go through all the photos and give them a ranking out of 5. 2189 of these photos I’ll delete as they were duplicates or had some technical problem (out of focus, badly composed etc), of the remaining 1367 perhaps 80-100 will make their way onto facebook or this blog, the rest probably won’t be seen by anyone but me. The way I see it it’s a numbers game, it took 3500 to get 100 totally different photos that I really like, if I’d taken only 2000 photos then there would be photos in my top 100 that weren’t good enough to make my 3500 top 100.
Lens Selection
For the months leading up to departure I was agonising about what lenses to take. On one hand Borneo is a once in a lifetime opportunity bursting at the seams with photographic opportunities and it deserves the best lenses and bodies available – but on the other hand good lenses are big and heavy and valuable, and as we were backpacking around this was going to be a hassle. Eventually I made the decision to leave the good gear at home and simply take my 40D with the Sigma 18-200 along with a 10-20 for the odd shot. I’m still not sure I made the right decision, the convenience of having an 11x zoom on one lens was incredible, but there were LOADS of times I wished I could dial it in to f/2.8 instead of the f/6.3 I was limited to at 200mm (still with me? I told you I’d be nerding it up).
ISO and noise
Because I was limited to f/6.3 when shooting at 200mm (which was pretty often in the jungle) I really struggled to get an acceptable shutter speed that wouldn’t result in camera shake. As a result I was frequently shooting at ISO 1600 and sometimes even at 3200 – this is fine on my 5D2 but the 40D is now 3 years old and the noise back in 2007 was a lot more obvious that it is on today’s cameras. The first thing I did when I got back was to upgrade to Lightroom 3, I’d read the noise reduction was good and I was blown away with the effectiveness. Here’s a shot I took of a rare Western Tarsier, firstly with noise reduction applied, and then without. Clearly it’s not a great photo by any means, but shooting without a tripod at 1/30th shutter speed and ISO 3200 on a 3 year old camera I think it’s about as good as the situation allowed (didn’t use the flash as it scares the animals).
If you’re a photographer wondering whether it’s worth the upgrade to LR3 then my advice is to go straight out and do it, the noise reduction alone is worth the extra cash plus there’s a bunch of other useful things I’m in the process of discovering.
I’m sure I had a bunch of other things I was going to talk about but they seem to have escaped me. If you’ve got any questions about what gear I used, or how I took any of the photos or anything in general just leave them in the comments section below and I’ll tell you what I did (not necessarily the right way or the wrong way – just the way I did it this time). Whoa, this is coming off as pretty self indulgent – just to clarify – in no way am I passing myself off as a travel photographer of note, I just figured that if I find this stuff interesting then maybe a few of you do to. Over and out, for now.
