This page last modified on 17 August, 2003
This collection now shows photo photos of over 250 bird species, most of them taken using the new Leica scope setup described below. The opening page is a Table Of Contents list of hypertext links ordered according to the chapter list in David Sibley's "The Sibley Guide To Birds" (published by Knopf, Borzoi Books in mid 2000). In cases where I have good photographs of relatively few species per chapter, I have lumped together a small number of adjacent chapters in Sibley's order.
We saw the birds in this collection at locations throughout California, Arizona (mostly southeastern), western New Mexico, southern Oregon, and Midway Island (furthest west in the Hawaiian chain). Not included are birds seen and photographed in the last 4 years in Peru, Bolivia, and southern Africa. A few of the Bolivia birds may be seen in the general topic collection on our trip to Bolivia (please use the link from my homepage!!).
I've just removed 55 MBytes of files covering Peru from this website in order to get enough free space for this Birds collection. Eventually, I will re-post a much reduced collection concentrating on the birds and bromeliads of Peru.
The Birds collection shown on this website includes roughly 1500 photos, all at a resolution of 640x480 pixels. Each chapter collection has an Index Page, which is the first page displayed when you click either a chapter link, or a link in the common names list below the list of chapters. The Index list allows you to "parachute" into a chapter collection to display the first photo for the species you select. All of the photos in a chapter are in a single sequence intented to be displayed as a "slide-show" using the icons in the column at the left side of the screen. The top icon (marked "P") takes you to the next Photo. The second icon (marked "T") takes you to the next Topic - in this collection that means to the next Bird Species. The set of icons function in the manner used with most tape recorders and VCR's.
Note: When you click a chapter or common-name link in the main Table Of Contents ("TOC") page, your browser should "Pop-Up" a second window in which the Photos or Index list will appear. Recent browser versions permit a user to block annoying pop-ups found in the advertising on some websites. You will need to un-block pop-ups to be able to display the photos in the manner intended on this website. The main point of this design is to allow both the photos and the main Table Of Contents page to be displayed at the same time.
For home and group slide-show use, I maintain the Birds collection at (not quite) 1024x768 "XGA" resolution for full screen display, and saved at a compression setting of 7 in PhotoShop. This currently takes up over 200 MB on a CD-Rom. I've also generated an equivalent main list for Lou's use on a laptop showing the photos at 640x480 "VGA" resolution, and using the same compression setting in ImageReady. That laptop version takes up roughly 115 MB and is also saved on the CD-Rom. Both versions contain roughly 15 percent more images than you find on this website. Those images were removed to reduce the collection to 100 MB to fit on this website.
Original images from the Nikon 990 camera (those taken since May 2000) are all at the "fine" resolution of 2048x1536. While a few of the bird samples in my list show versions of the originals as reduced in PhotoShop, the majority have been cropped out of the original - then reduced if necessary to the final 925x694 resolution I use on the CD-Rom version.
The HTML files used to create the user interface in this Birds collection are generated with an authoring program that I've developed for personal use using Delphi 3.
I had planned to use the same presentation approach with my collection of Wildflower photos associated with each Genus, but with one principal difference. If you refer the the collection labelled "San Diego County Wildflowers" (please use the link on my homepage!!), you will find the top level Photo-Key organized to help in flower identification. I've now had that Photo-Key posted on this website for over 2 years. There has been no E-mail traffic, and no indication from several California organizations interested in wildflowers, that anyone is interested in going further with this Photo-Key approach to flower identification. So I now plan to contribute my photos on the more unusual wildflower species to the CalFlora database.
Status as of 22 March, 2001:
In addition to Bromeliads (flowers that grow wild in tropical Americas), my wife Lou has an abiding interest in birds and birdwatching. So I've tried to provide photographs to support this interest.
Results were disappointing until mid January this year, when I discovered some amazing bird photographs taken with the Nikon Coolpix 990 camera. Laurence Poh has been a cheerleader for using the 990 with high quality birding scopes. Stéphane Moniotte's Digiscoping website provides details on how various others have gotten great bird images with a variety of similar arrangements. I've followed their lead, and quickly gotten (what I consider to be) equally amazing results. The whole point of this suite of web pages is to describe what has worked for me so that others with similar interests may take advantage of these experiences.
The essential change needed to get these results was that I switched to a really high quality birding scope (Leica APO Televid 77). I previously had thought that the Bausch & Lomb "Discoverer" scope (recommended by Audubon and other birding groups) was of appropriate quality.
These pages provide:
About the Essential Change:
The Red-tailed Hawk photos provide a good example of why I had been disappointed with the results using the B&L scope, and excited about those with the Leica scope.
-------------------- Leica -------------------------------------------------- Bausch & Lomb --------------------------
In the B&L example you will immediately notice the annoying deep blue border just inside the bird's wing on the left side, and just under the cross-bar on the power pole. That blue border is caused by chromatic aberration, and by other optical deficiencies, in the B&L scope. The blue border occurs using the B&L scope whenever there is a high contrast border separating a very bright area (like the sky background) from a very dark area (often a bird's body, tree limb, etc...). It took me quite a while to accept that the blue border is due to chromatic aberration. One normally expects the prismatic effect to be balanced out at the center of the image, and to increase radially going away from the center. Whenever I tested the B&L scope using the ISO camera test pattern (See the excellent website of the Imaging-Resource for details.) I found the blue borders to be concentrated on just one side of the black patterns against the white background. But eventually I "eyeball tested" the B&L scope with the ISO pattern, and found obvious symmetrical chromatic aberration when the full frame was visible. In fact, near the outer edges of the pattern there were bright yellow borders within the white background areas. Evidently results with the Coolpix camera are a result of the complicated optical combination.
A few of the photos, showing birds with bright overcast sky in the background, exhibit thin red or blue-green borders at the high contrast edges. See the Cedar Waxwing image for an example. This appears to be caused by bleeding of color between adjacent pixels in the camera's CCD sensor. In the Coolpix cameras (and most other digital cameras designed for consumers) each pixel element has a Green, Red, or Blue filter. There are twice as many Green pixels as there are Red and Blue pixels. You can find a detailed description of this arrangement at the Imaging-Resource website.
The photos taken with the B&L scope also suffered from degraded resolution. As described in full detail on the Imaging-Resource website, the ISO pattern is designed to provide a precise measurement of camera resolution for comparison purposes. I had found that the best resolution available using the B&L scope with the Nikon 950/990 cameras was no better than about 60 percent of the camera's native resolution (with no add-on lens). In fact it had proven necessary to optimize this resolution by carefully adjusting the distance of the camera's lens from the eyepiece of the B&L scope.
What's amazing about the Leica scope is:
Higher magnifications are available using Leica's 20-60X zoom eyepiece. But available resolution is degraded. In fact I've found that the best image resolution with the Leica scope occurs at 20X, even with small distant objects. This means that the fixed 20X eyepiece is (virtually) always better with the camera, since it offers twice the width of the cone of view. But for viewing distant objects through the scope with the naked eye the 20-60X eyepiece is certainly an advantage.
Question about Sharpness Variation within a Continuous Mode Sequence:
Normal practice in experimental measurements, like tests of camera resolution, is to take 3 or more exposures, then either select the best or take the average of several samples. So I've used this approach in my scope/camera resolution measurements. When testing with the B&L scope, I had found it beneficial to set the camera to a fixed focal distance (roughly 5 ft), then adjust the scope's focus with the camera's "Focus Confirmation" option option turned on (see the 990 printed manual page 56). This permitted using the camera's LCD screen (viewed thru a 4X loupe) to get a reasonably accurate manual focus setting. There seemed to be no benefit to switching the camera to AutoFocus mode after doing this.
With the Leica Scope, the camera's AutoFocus provides a substantial benefit - apparently because of several of the optical improvements mentioned above. Using the Leica Scope with (a portion of) the ISO test pattern (suitably scaled up in size) at a distance of about 40 yards (meters) I found a substantial variation of image sharpness (i.e. apparent resolution) from one image to the next taken under seemingly identical conditions.
In the 950 and 990 cameras, Nikon has provided a "Best Shot Selection" (BSS) option. When this is used, the camera will take a series of exposures as rapidly as possible, while saving the raw images in its internal memory. The camera's on-board computer will then select the "best" of these exposures, and save to Compact Flash memory only that best image. Nikon has not been willing to describe the logic used in this Best Shot Selection, so one has to conjecture. At least in the 950, it appeared that the best shot was the one consuming the largest amount of memory when compressed to JPEG encoding. In any event, I've found that BSS mode often selects the wrong image out of a set. This can happen because birds (and often flowers in the breeze) move significantly from image to image in the (roughly half second) time per image required by the camera in Fine Quality mode. It can also happen because the camera is confused by the significance of random noise in the darker portions of the image - even when using Sensitivity of ISO 100. So for most of three years, I've habitually set the camera to Single Shot (Aperture Priority) mode.
Unfortunately, the camera's processing while compressing and saving a Fine Quality image takes several seconds. Since most birds tend to move almost continuously (if only their head while perched on a branch), I decided to do some of the Leica scope resolution tests using the camera's Continuous Shooting mode (Single AF Focus Option). At Fine Quality, this produces either 3 or 4 shots - again at a rate of roughly 2 per second. Since I use the Single AF focus option to conserve battery power (not to mention wear and tear on the focus mechanism!!), the camera adjusts its exposure and focus just once at the beginning of the sequence. All shots in the sequence are taken at the same setting.
So why is there a big variation in image sharpness from one shot to the next in a Continuous Shooting mode sequence??? I may have tried this arrangement with the B&L scope once or twice, but found that it didn't contribute much benefit because the variations were masked by the optical shortcomings of the scope. But the quality of the Leica Scope is so good that the variations have become quite obvious!! At first, I thought that the explanation might be that unavoidable small shaking of the scope/camera combination might smear the image over the duration of a typical exposure. (I use a Canon portable tripod that weighs about 5 pounds. Combined with scope and camera, that weight is at the edge of reasonable when hiking long distances into the bush - yet wanting to photograph that bird on short notice when it's discovered.) But the light collecting power of the Leica scope is good enough that exposures at 1/500 or even 1/1000 are often quite practical with the 990 in normal daylight at speed setting of 100 ISO. So the faster exposures should noticeably reduce the variations in image sharpness. It does not seem that they do!! If anyone reading this note understands what is happening, I'd appreciate an explanation (to address shown on my homepage). Until I get such an explanation, the best solution seems to be to continue selecting the best of 3 or 4 Continuous Sequence shots to obtain one bird photo. Sigh ....