Graeme Chapman - natural history photographer - ornithologist

Equipment

My first bird pictures were of a female Eastern Whipbird sitting on her nest.They were taken using an old Contax rangefinder camera with 50 mm lens from a distance of about a metre. When the Kodachromes came back you can imagine how disappointed I was to see such a small dark image. I graduated from that to a superb old Sanderson teak and brass quarter-plate camera with 120 adaptor (I wish I had it now) and those first pics of Yellow-tufted Honeyeaters on Anscochrome film are still in good condition.

Next came a Practica FX2 (no prism) which went off like a shotgun, followed by a Pentax Spotmatic with prism, an innovation! Coupled to a 400 mm Telemegor which weighed a ton and a light aluminium tripod, it was not the best combination for sharp pictures. I knew little about the effects of camera shake, let alone mirror vibration so most of my early pictures were well-exposed blurs. Few of them survived. I tried all sorts of films - Agfa, Gevaert and Perutz but none of them stood the test of time like Kodachrome in all its forms.

When I moved to Canberra in 1962, I met a master of black and white photography, Ederic Slater and he impressed on me two important things: (1) how to hold a camera still and (2) just how good Leica cameras and lenses are. To him I am eternally grateful.

Most of my lenses were made by Leitz and I have a range of camera bodies – my original Leicaflex SL, still a precision instrument, Contax 167MT and Pentax LX, all excellent film cameras but now replaced by digital SLRs, Nikon D2H, D200 and D40. The 400 mm f5.6 Leitz Telyt long focus lens and Televit rapid focus mount are my mainstays and are still in good condition after 40 years of use (see photo at right).

All these camera bodies work in manual mode with this lens using various adaptors mostly cobbled together from extension tubes.

Mounted on a superb old Miller wooden tripod with fluid head, it is a go anywhere outfit provided you have the strength to carry it. With this setup I have taken shots in subdued light without flash on exposures as long as one second – quite sharp so long as the subject doesn’t move.

Nearly all my pictures are taken in natural light, usually by stalking. I rarely use a hide. With the smaller birds in their native environment, autofocus is unpredictable and in fact, little quicker than I can focus with my Televit. If I fail, the fault is mine, not that of the camera. However, with birds out in the open, especially in flight, autofocus has opened up a whole new era of bird photography. My favourite lens in this regard is a Nikon 300 mm F/4 AFS, often with 1.4x converter. Not only is this combination fairly light, it is also affordable. This equates to 600 mm on a Nikon D200 body – any longer than this and camera shake and vibration start to become a major problem.

Digital capture has all but replaced the old film based technology and now the better 35 mm digital SLR cameras produce results that rival a good scan from Kodachrome or Velvia. I have three different Nikon bodies and no doubt will replace them regularly as the technology improves.

Nikon’s latest models, the D3 and D300 will both be superb for wildlife photography and so are their new long telephoto lenses (500 mm & 600 mm) if you can both afford them and carry them!

A word of warning. Don’t be misled by the megapixel mania. I can make superb A3+ sized prints from my D2H camera and it is only 4.2 megapixels. As a rough guide, take the square root of the claimed megapixel figure to compare cameras. So, to double the linear resolution of a 4 Mpix camera, you need a 16 Mpix camera!

 

 

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Graeme Chapman at Karumba - dusk
Telyt long focus lens and Televit rapid focus mount
Leitz Telyt 400mm long focus lens and Televit rapid focus mount. The camera is a Nikon D2H.