DIGISCOPING is taking pictures with a digital camera using a telescope as a lens -- in my case, my Nikon Fieldscope 60 ED spotting scope. I found I could hold my digital point-and-shoot camera pinched to the eyepiece with my left hand and fire away. I took most of the digiscopes on this website with an Olympus 550, a long-since obsolete three megapixel camera.
DIGITAL SLR BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY. In Fall 2003, Canon introduced the Digital Rebel (300D), the first digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera to sell for less than $1000. I bought one, and I was soon hooked. I had done some SLR black-and-white photography back in the Seventies, including my own darkroom work. It was a lot of fun and I still have some of the pictures I took, but it was time-consuming and life was too hectic; I gave it up long before I got into birding. Still, it left me with memories of some basic photographic skills and techniques, and I found I could revive some of these, while working on new ones.
LENSES. I started with a basic consumer zoom lens (Tamron 70-300), but once I knew I was into bird SLR photography to stay, I bought a Canon 300mm f/4 IS in January 2004. Soon after that I added the Canon 400 f/5.6. I also own the Canon 70-200 f/4 zoom, great for landscapes and kids' soccer, which I occasionally use for birds. My two workhorse bird photography lenses are the Canon 500 f/4, since February 2005, and the 400 f/4 DO, since May 2007. The former is a classic long lens, and the latter is nearly as good, and more versatile, as it is light enough to carry around and handhold easily, and with a 1.4x extender gives me a 560 f/5.6.
CAMERAS ETC. In February 2005 I upgraded my camera from the Rebel to a Canon 20D. Since then, I've upgraded through a succession of cameras: 30D, 40D, ID Mark III (3/08), and Mark IV (1/10). I normally use the Mark III or IV with the 500 lens and a 1.4x (rarely, a 2x) extender on a Gitzo 3530 tripod with a Wimberley II head, and a 580EX flash when that is called for. Occasionally I handhold the 500 with a 1D camera; more often for handholding, I use these cameras with the 400 DO, with or without extender.
FORMAT AND PROCESSING. When I first took up SLR photography, I used Photoshop Elements, and later I upgraded to Photoshop CS2. I shot in jpeg large fine until March 2005, when I shifted over to RAW, which I convert with Breezebrowser Pro.
THIS SITE. This website was originally built on Geocities with PageBuilder, a web editor that disappeared in 2009 when Yahoo eliminated Geocities. I established my own domain, tgreybirds.com, with Yahoo, and had the contents of my site transferred here. After floundering around for a while, I adopted SeaMonkey Composer as my website editor in early 2010, and shifted to the very similar KomPozer in 2011. The pages added or rebuilt with these editors have a period after their names on the alphabetical index page, and the species name at the top of their species pages is in bold. I'm told that they are in relatively clean HTML, while the older pages created by PageBuilder are quite messy. Thanks to Joe Neto for helping me save the work I'd put into the Geocities site, and to Devon Cattell for helping me find a sufficiently dummy-proof web editor.