How have changes in photography made nature photography easier?

I am young what advantage do the gear I have access to now that wasn’t possible or harder for you?

I don’t have very good photographic equipment, but the lack of it is palpable when photographing either at a distance that can’t be closed (nervous animals, inaccessible plants, anything up high), in water (specialised equipment one way or another), anything high detail (small flowers, flower reproductive parts, small insects), in imperfect circumstances (high glare, brightness, darkness, low contrast), something moving (windy weather, many animals)…

It can also matter to durability. High-quality gear can be fragile, but it can also be less easy to damage - can you imagine how easy it is to drop or break your phone halfway up a cliff or balancing beside a river? OP is self-described as an adventurer who photographed in jungle river crevasses (which is freaking AWESOME by the way).

Can also matter to storage capacity, data records (how good is your geolocation, for instance, and is it recording altitude, temperature…?)…

I saw a photo of a burrowing owl in an article about American restoration activities, and that photo was apparently captured by leaving a GoPro near a known burrow taking lots of photos and then coming back later and seeing what came out - knowing what equipment to use can expand your options massively.

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Pretty off topic, so I’ll be very brief but… not sure what TheJungleExplorer had in mind, but as I’m quite definitely not young (unless in spirit), my answer would unequivocally be “digital” and all that that entails.

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We remember.
When you had a (physical) film in your camera.
12 or 20 exposures.
No way you would take a picture ‘of the label for info’
You allocated your chosen 12 very carefully, and might have to wait till the film was full to develop pictures from that holiday / excursion / hike.
Then you had to take them to be developed and printed (expensive).
Wait. Some more.
You might be extravagant, if the pictures would be worthwhile - and take an extra film along.

Now I have photograph albums I sometimes look at. 12 kilos of prints to sort.

Come back from a hike with about 100 photos. Sort them for my blog and iNat. A whole different experience!

PS - didn’t they have colours when you were young, granny? :cry:

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I spent over 20 years doing deep jungle exploration in Central and South America starting in the 1970s. My purpose was other than photography, so all I had was regular consumer grade 35mm film cameras. Film cameras were a limiting factor. You had 24 shots per roll usually, and you had to finish the roll before you could put a new roll in. Each roll of film had a speed, which is the same thing as ISO on modern cameras. So, to change your ISO for different conditions, you had to change your roll of film, which you could not do until you had used up the roll. These are just a couple things that modern people do not face with digital cameras.

Even when digital cameras first came out, there were still limiting factors. Storage media (SD cards), were a premium price. You paid about a $1 per Megabyte of storage. Yes, that is Megabyte, not Gigabyte. A 128MB Sony Memory Stick, would set you back a cool $100 on sale. That was considered a huge card. If you took images in max quality on a 2MP camera, you could fit maybe 30 images on that card. So, like film cameras, you still had a limiting factor. It is not like today, where you have almost no limitations.

Sony, came up with a solution to this in 2000 when they invented a camera that could write to mini CD-r disk. I was first inline to buy the Mavica CD-200 when it came out. CD-r disk could hold 200MB and cost only $2 a piece. For me, it was just shy of a miracle. Almost limitless ability to shoot images without worry of running out of storage space.

In 2006 (once storage media dropped radically in price), I upgraded to the Sony DSC-V1, which was classified as a Pro-sumer camera at the time, but today would be called a “Crossover” or “Bridge” camera. In my opinion, this is possibly the best all-in-one camera ever invented.

.

Aside from being a tiny pocketable camera with an actual Hot shoe and full manual controls, this camera actually had Nightshot, which allowed you to take shots in the dark. I used this camera in the Arctic, and was the only person in my group that had a camera that could capture the aurora borealis. I call this shot the Twisty Donut.

Of course, by today’s standards, this camera is junk, but at the time, it was cutting edge.

Today, we live in a golden age of camera technology, with people owning smartphones that have amazing cameras that can shoot both images and video. Of course, professional cameras are light-years ahead of what they were 40 years ago, with amazing entry level equipment in the reach of the general public.

I hope this answers your question.

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for anyone with the required mobility and a steady hand, a cell phone (with or without a clipon macro lens) can capture details as small as half a mm very well. if your subject holds still a mini tripod could help too.

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Certainly does, didn’t know about the much limited number of pictures per roll and the ISO thing. Could have googled it but then I wouldn’t hear your stories I look forward to keep photografing insects using modern tools for many many years

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If you were lucky, you got back the pictures you sent in for developing. Sometimes the rolls got mixed up and you received someone else’s photos. I once got a selection of family-vacation-at-Disney-World instead of my photos from the Siapa River. I returned the Disney photos but whoever got mine didn’t do me the same favor.

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100% I was an early adopter of Google Photos back when it was Unlimited, and I uploaded everything. I currently have 180,000 photos on Google Photos. This does not include any of my professional photos, just personal stuff from my phone. I have over 20TB of storage on my PC most of it consumed with Raw images and 4K video of nature subjects (I don’t do portrait or cityscape photography, just nature).

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Yes, indeed! You had to be very choosy about which shots to take, especially when traveling in a place with nowhere to buy more film. And there was no way to preview the pix, so that you could reshoot the bad ones.
And when you rewound the roll to take it out of the camera, you worried whether it rewound properly, so you didn’t accidentally expose the film when you opened the camera. A grinding sound when rewinding was definitely a bad omen, because then you had to find a pitch dark place to open the camera, and grope inside to feel whether the film was stuck.
Good times!

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Ah yes, the good (bad) old days of film cameras.

I’m slowly getting back to digitally scanning my old slides of various organisms. The problems I’ve encountered include failure to record date and location on all slides, so I have to check hand-written field notes to see if I have that info. That’s assuming there’s a processing date stamped on the slide frame which gives me a clue of about when I took the photo. I have some decent images that I can’t pinpoint when and where I took the photo. Very frustrating.

Plus there was the heartbreak of buying film, shooting a few rolls, sending off for processing and paying for that, only to find your camera was on a wrong setting the whole time resulting in worthless pics.

All of which is why many of us took relatively few pics in the past.

Added: You younger folks might not realize that it was not that many years ago when we didn’t have smartphones, GPS, EXIF data on your pics, and the like, let alone digital cameras. Those were the days of paper maps and hand-written field notes. But we did have motorized vehicles.

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It was also possible to leave the lens cap on.
Sometimes the film wouldn’t load correctly at the beginning. Now and then the lead end of the film would be inside the cassette, leaving the question of is it exposed already, or fresh film requiring a leader retriever?
Many may not realize about all manual settings as well as manual focus… everything was up to the photographer.

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You got that right. When you are 200 miles out in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest and carrying everything on your back that you need to live and survive for the next two months, you are not carrying 20 rolls of extra film, and no local store to get more. Each shot is carefully calculated.

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The time (and money) it took to develop fairly predictble results. Anybody with a new smartphone today can take more prctice shots in a day than most of us would shoot in a year.

Also, digital files (especially RAW) provide a gigantic fudge factor for rescuing less than optimal exposures. No AI or undos in film. Just a bunch of limited darkroom moves available to compensates for the shutterbug’s NS (Natural Stupidity).

But the skill levels of the film era masters – such a lifetime of details and understanding to command. Skills which I can see are already making their way to the great human skill landfill will not likely ever return in any serious way. (I’ve got quite a lot of those sent there too. Typsetter markup or reprographic pasteup skills, anyone?)

Then there’s bang for your buck. You take the average cost of any of today’s smartphone lineup, and compare it to what they are capable of…

If you could go back in time and give a film era photographer a look at one of these things, they’d probably either kill you – or themselves.

In way, it’s sad. But if getting more and more people observing nature is the result, I’m behind the new photography-for-all movement all the way.

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That really was the game changer. Gaining any kind of skill with a film camera was a painful process of so many wasted prints of images that didn’t turn out. Whereas with a digital camera I could sit and retake the same image 20 times with different settings as long as I had the patience and a stationary subject. Then after a few more years went by I became able to touch up the digital images after the fact. We were so impressed by the ability to remove red-eye (writing this I realize modern cameras don’t even produce red-eye!) or simple brightness adjustments.

I am not that old but I had a minor childhood interest in photography that my dad, always a fan of gadgets, was happy to indulge. I switched from film to digital at the age of 12 or 13. Then I had Photoshop at age 16 or 17, wow that was cool. It took measurable minutes for the program to stich panorama shots. Now any camera will do it as the shot is being taken.

Ironically it was iNat that conditioned me to take “bad” photos. Previously I would not bother with the shot but now there are organisms to document before my hiking companions leave me in the dust…

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I would be something like that scene in the 1999 movie “Blast from the Past” with Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone, where the father (Christopher Walken), an eccentric genius who had been living in a sealed atomic bomb shelter for thirty years, see his first Microwave! A modern smartphone would seem like magic to a photographer from fifty years ago.

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Good point! Many iNatters happily post observations with really bad photos, because we are really hoping we found something rare, or at least a “lifer”.
No need to look any further than this topic for evidence:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/whats-the-worst-pic-you-uploaded-to-inat/40286

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Yeah, that has been happening to me a LOT since I first discovered iNat. LOL!

Ooh! There’s a different looking lichen on that rock I have never seen before, Let me snap a quick picture of it for iNat. HEY! Where did everybody go?!

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Plus there was no such thing as metadata meaning one had no idea when or where a photo was taken unless one had taken careful notes. Instead, one often had to rely on the surrounding photos to infer when a particular picture must have been taken in a given sequence.

That’s just the taking picture side of things. Don’t forget that to view slides, one needed a special tray and projector. And they needed to be loaded in the right order and the right orientation. Heaven forbid you have an experience like I did as a grad student during a symposium talk….burned out bulb. I can still remember the session moderator turning to me and saying, we have to keep on schedule, did you bring overheads of your talk? No? Can you given your talk by drawing the visuals from memory? Go!

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Or accidentally turning the slide tray over without the locking ring in place and dumping all your carefully organized and properly oriented slides on the floor right before a talk.

PowerPoint changed so much about preparing and giving a presentation.

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