abrevations

Greetings,

I have been learning alot from viewing the photos and the comments on the Avian gallery and bird photography forum. But, I am not sure of all of the abreviations being used. I think I have figured out most of them but what is CCW? Perhaps a response listing the commonly used ones would be helpful to new members such as myself.

sincerely,

John Tobias

CCW is "counter clockwise"...a couple of other common ones :

OOF - Out of Focus
DOF - Depth of Field
BG - Background
FG - Foreground
PSPSGIBIDMTICPATG - Please stop posting such great images because it depresses me that I can't post any that good

(OK, maybe that last one is a little less common than the others...)

PS - Photoshop
LR - Lightroom
IMHO - in my humble opinion

GBH -great blue heron
GE -great egret
GHO - great horned owl

PP - Post Processing
URC - Upper Right Corner
ULC - Upper Left Corner
LRC - Lower Right Corner
LLC - Lower Left Corner
WTF - Huh? or Pardon me?
HDR - High Dynamic Range

John:
Thanks for asking, the responses have cleared up a lot of questions I'm sure others have had, including myself.

Don

Thanks everyone, this is very helpful.

John

Actually, GBH is GBHE and GE is GREG, GHO is GHOW

You can find the Complete Species Table in Alpha Code order here:

http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbl/MANUAL/aspeclst.htm

Since Lia brought up the dreaded four letter codes for bird names I'd like to suggest that we don't use them here at NPN.

These codes are a point of great contention on the various birding listserves around the country. People who come out of the world of bird banding often use them because they are so convenient, but they can cause problems when used outside of that circle:

- there are more than one system of these four letter codes
- it is easy to go from the full name down to the code, but much harder to go back up to the full name
- they tend to be exclusionary and create "insiders" who know the codes and everyone else who doesn't
- they save a bit of time for the person writing them, but waste lots of time for those trying to read them who have to reconstruct what they are

So, if you choose to use them please follow the general rule of spelling out the full name at the start before first using the insider code.

A few more abbreviations:

CS4 = Adobe Creative Suite 4, of which Photoshop is a part)
TC = teleconverter

I agree with Richard about the four letter banding codes. They're very useful in the field (it's much quicker to write down AWPE than American White Pelican). But they don't have a useful place in "social" conversation.

One other abbreviation:

FF=full frame

I agree on eschewing the use of the four letter codes, though I do find them handy for file naming.

Great topic.

I agree that I'd rather see the more common bird codes used around here simply because they're acronyms, so one letter per word - like GBH for Great Blue Heron. Of course, if you use the 4 letter ones I'm sure it will still be pretty clear what you mean.