My wife, Paula, and I have been avid birders for about the past 10 years. This initially led us into photography as a way of preserving many wonderful images of birds and other natural wonders that we encountered in our sojourns. Initially, I relied on 20 year old Canon 35mm equipment and shot slide film. Later, we realized the limitations of this equipment as we struggled to make quality images of distant birds. Finally, last year we decided to get serious about digital photography and took the leap to quality equipment. Our intial purchase was a Canon EOS 20D with a 100-400mm IS L lens, and we recently purchased a 500mm f/4 IS L Canon lens and 1.4 TC. Now, we enjoy the pursuit of nature photography as a primary activity rather than an afterthought. We both have been coming up the learning curve for capturing interesting photos of birds and other nature scenes with our new equipment, and I have also been gaining some experience with Photoshop CS2 for the last few months. Apparently some of our efforts at good nature photography have not been in vain, since we were just published in the Winter 2005 edition of Nature Photographer magazine and again in the Spring 2006 issue. We just completed a winter trip to Yellowstone in February, 2006, and will be sharing a number of great images soon.
Charlie Robertson
