A tele objective (200 mm) is also useful. The greater distance makes lighting by flash easy, and also the animals don't get disturbed. A tele objective has the disadvantage of less depth of field and greater sensitivity to an unquiet hand. Also the image quality often does not reach that of a good 50 mm macro objective.
Technically, lighting by photo lamps (two lamps, 500 W, colour: daylight) is also good. But the intensive light made my animals quite nervous.
Purely flash-lit pictures benefit from a great amount of indirect, reflected light from walls and ceiling. I use a strong flash, attached with an arm at the side of the camera, which has an additional little flash on top of the camera to lighten up shadows. On top of the main flash a reflective board can be mounted at which the flash directs its light from below. From the board a very soft light is reflected downwards at an angle of 45 degrees. This construction is simple but effective, it often made up the difference between a bad and a good photo. It also prevents red eyes in portraits.
Problems in lighting close-ups occur when the lens is so near to the object that it sheds a shadow on it. In such cases it helps when the flash is taken off the camera and held appropriately by a second person. The above described reflective board also solves the problem, and with good effect.
Julian Barker wrote to me about his lighting set up: "I normally use two linked GN35 flashes mounted on stands about a metre above the gerbils reflecting light of brollys to take flash pictures of gerbils with a flash meter to get the aperture correct. I have found this a very reliable set up giving good results with excellent colour, soft shadows and depth of field. Because this takes time to erect it is not always easy at shows to use. So I recently bought a second-hand ring flash. I get great pictures with it except that I get red-eye from gerbils from almost any angle. Even taking pictures from almost behind the gerbil I get red eye! I only get red eye with Mongolian Gerbils. None of the pictures of jirds taken with ring flash has produced any red eye at all."
It is a general rule to always focus on the most important detail of a picture. In animals this is the eye, more precisely the pupil. This is also true with other objects: The "eye" of a flower are the stamina. A good example is the picture shown besides, where I observed the rule - the wrong way: In a hurry not to miss the funny scene I focused on the eye of the older animal while the most imortant part of the picture is the closed eye of the little one, on which I should have focused.
Even when you use a flash a bright permanent lighting of the room is necessary for focusing. Also it is recommendable to use a small aperture setting to gain depth of field and thereby also reduce the effect of imperfect focusing. Depth of field drastically decreases at smaller distances.
Negative films are cheaper, but the quality of the prints that are produced in masses by great laboratories often is miserably low, particularly with special images, resulting in colour faults and wrong exposure. Fortunately some of these faults can be corrected by image processing.
The quality of the raw scans can be greatly improved by polishing with an image processing software. Adobe Photoshop is a standard tool for image processing.
The size of an image file firstly depends on the size of the image (the number of pixels to be displayed on the screen), secondly on the resolution of this image (measured in dpi). Display of an image on a monitor needs 72 dpi, while scanners may produce pictures of a significantly higher resolution. It makes sense to scan at a high resolution (to get the maximum of quality out of the hardware), but afterwards the resolution of such an image must be adjusted to avoid waste of memory which can amount to many megabytes.
Browsers allow re-sizing of images at display time: When you indicate a different height or width within the IMG tag than the size of the image in pixels it gets resized by the browser. This should be avoided, since it wastes download time (if the original image is larger), and it often results in a decrease in quality of the displayed image! Examples:
width and height is indicated.
width and height is indicated.
Digitizing and re-sizing an image can cause a considerable loss in sharpness, which should be corrected by using the sharpening filter when the image processing is finished.
A common format for loss-less image storage is TIFF. Some programs allow to store TIFF files with (loss-less) LZW compression. This results in smaller files, but not all software can read these files.
JPEG ist the common file format for presenting images on the WWW. JPEG compression is lossy, which is not very disturbing at the lowest compression (highest quality) level. For the Internet higher compression rates are necessary to get an acceptable file size. Even when you use only JPEG files it is worth considering an archive of TIFF "master files", because JPEG files loose quality every time you work on them and then re-compress them.
On my home page you find more links to landscape photography and gerbils.