Thank you for catching those calls - I only ever get the raucous sqwarks!

Thank you!

Whereas all hummingbirds are completely foreign to me - I’ve seen a few in aviary’s and that’s it :)

Uh-huh, and the significant technical differences between those are?

(Hint: a digital video is a sequence of digital photos, usually with digital compression taking advantage of limited changes between adjacent photos, but mostly the same principles as, say, RAW to JPG compression)

OK, I’ll bite - apart from imposing discipline on choosing your shot, and more human control over the process if you develop at home, what are the benefits of film over digital? My working assumption is that if you start with RAW format from any decent sensor, and comparable lenses, you can produce anything you could produce by choice of film, development process or similar - but perhaps I’m wrong!

Oh, if you’ve got a good printer (and ink for it!!!) then, yes, use them (especially if someone else is paying for it) - but I’ve pretty much given up on home colour printing these days - the ink is too expensive, and and runs out too fast. And the online equivalents are I suspect cheaper than home printing if you add all the costs in, and often better quality.

Getting high quality digital prints from digital photos is amazingly cheap these days (for example, I use https://www.photobox.co.uk/photo-printing/photo-prints-6x4 ) Which is also cheaper than professionally developed film - though you should avoid the temptation of photobooks, canvas prints, and so forth except in special circumstances.

So, get into good habits of quickly discarding bad shots (e.g. out of focus), and the worst versions when you have taken multiple shots of the same thing - either in pauses in your photography (avoid chimping) or when you get back home. Then do a round of basic cropping and any lighting adjustments. Perhaps add keywords or star ratings to the photos if that’s your thing. Then consider what is worth printing, and what just kept digitally. Also purge functional shots (such as the pill photos of the video) when no longer useful.

I think with good habits, you’ll spend less time on drudgery than film photography (whether you develop it professionally or yourself), you’ll have moments of admiring your work as you do so (I hope!) and have better results at the end of it all.

Film photography can serve as a useful discipline in thinking about your craft, or be more rewarding as an act of creation, but it won’t save you time or effort.

Out of interest, does he ever address the irony of using a youtube video (i.e. digital photography) - that in passing i found too long (i.e. too much digital content, completing the irony) to complete watching - to praise film photography?

Corvid, yes, Crow no.

If it helps, same bird from the side:

Ha!

You’re finding wisdom - have you yet reached the truth that the only true measure of whether your photo is good is that you like it, not the opinion of others? (dammit, there’s a famous little book I want to quote and I’ve forgotten the title/where my copy is).

In your chain of reasoning, you missed the galaxy of things that occur between what your camera sensor captures (perhaps best reflected in the RAW format version), and the JPG image you eventually view. The whole luminance curve thing involves so much choice by you, your camera or your software. And then there’s all the default sharpening and moiré correction and so forth that is applied without asking (unless you override it).

It also looks like you’ve understood at least some when B&W is worth using!

Tried quite hard to get a good crow photo for you, but my skills weren’t up to it today, so this is as good as it got:

Now if you were posting from the UK that’s from a selection of only eight (ignoring a vagrant), and at least two more of those are not seen in Reading (and I’ve only knowingly seen a Raven once here).

But still, what are your top two favourites?

Deep green jealousy!

You can just see traces of “gold” on the bottom left photo.

Slightly smaller than sparrows, and anyway, sparrow beaks are nothing like as pointed: crests are insect eaters and have the beaks to match.

That stress looks well worth it to me!

Very satisfying photo, but what is it? Some kind of sparrow, I guess, but not the sort I’d see in the UK.

Frustrating - and telling you to watch for small birds hopping up and down tree trunks (rather than lurking in bushes) … ummm … won’t endear me to you :)

Plus one vote for Merlin!

If you live near woodland I’d be surprised if nuthatches aren’t around. I’m lucky enough to face out onto a small patch of trees (a railway cutting!), and I occasionally get nuthatches on my fatball feeder. However, photoing birds on my feeder is hard (it being a small balcony area) and somehow doesn’t feel quite the point of birding!

I’d imagine Oregonians have become blind to a joke that must be at least decades old or are mutually agreeing to ignore all attempts at this joke.

Just for amusement in the associations with the name/similarities of intent, see the History section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_Caves

Also created in the 1740’s