New American photo-fieldguide

[john c]

As a rule I'm not impressed by photo-fieldguides to birds and maintain that a brilliantly crafted artist illustrated book like the Collins guide will always be superior. However, for the less Olympian birdguide perhaps the writing is on the wall or at least that seems to be the message here -
http://www.crossleybirds.com/gallery/THE-I-D-GUIDE-coming-soon

Yes, there are faults with the plates shown here, but they do seem head and shoulders above anything thus far and the author/photographer's philosophy seems very interesting. It'll be interesting to see it when it is finally published - not sure of the timescale though. How 'soon' is 'soon'? Anyone know?

John

[Odonate]

I am also not a great fan of photo guides but the montage idea looks a pretty good one and could work. My only slight criticism is that obviously the lighting it different in every photo and could cause some problems with shades

O

[AndyB]

In this digital day and age you should be able to create a good photographic guide in that easy to reference illustrated plate style. Kauffman's Birds of North America was in a similar vein. It was released at the same time as Sibley. I was excited to see how it turned out but was a little underwhelmed and, of course, as we all know Sibley stole the show. A page from Birds of North America below:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61GMWQN79CL._SS400_.jpg
I think Crossley's book looks interesting. I wonder how crowded it will look when text captions are added. It looks pretty busy as it is with some overpowering backgrounds and might benefit from some simplification and fewer images. However, for some families such as seabirds I think this photo plate concept could work quite well. The Wilson's Petrel plate looks useful and a guide like this focussing on seabirds could be helpful on a pelagic.

[Brian S]

I too think some of the plates look really nice - e.g. Cooper's Hawk, B&W Warbler, Cactus Wren, but (and you guessed this was coming) here are my thoughts:-

One species per page would make production expensive

The lack of comparison with similar species, in the same posture, on the same page - maybe this will be addressed

Background is interesting, if a touch overpowering in some, but leaves a lot of 'empty' space. A good illustrated page tries to fill this


It will be a nice book, but is it the ultimate ID guide?

Brian S

[DDolan1075]

I think that this would be a fantastic home guide as opposed to field guide. You figure that there would have to be at least 900 pages if one page per species and 1800 if on page for pictures and one for information. I love the pictures. I REALLY like the multiple angles views. I see a lot of birds leaving the scene. A lot of the guides don't give much for that kind of ID.

[Colin Key]

I have met Richard Crossley in the Algarve and, as I said in another recent thread, it was that meeting and subsequent visits to his website which converted me from digiscoping to DSLR photography. I admire his work (although I think that many images on his site have been down-rezzed for web publication and do not really do justice to his skills) and recall clearly the lengthy conversation we had and how he preferred to take more artistic images rather than just "bird in box" photos.

The printed work, when it appears, may look very different to these on-line pages, but for me they really do not work. I have not looked at all the samples given, but the ones I have seen give me a visual problem in that my eyes are "flitting" about all over the page and I find it difficult to concentrate on one single image. It is probably unkind (and I hope Richard forgives me if he should ever read this), but a couple of those pages could quite easily be used as a poster for a certain Alfred Hitchcock film.

It will be interesting to see what the actual "hard copy" looks like.

Colin

[john c]

Thanks for your prompt responses. I deliberately avoided making any detailed comments as I was interested to see what others thought first. I very much agree that this approach could work well with those species where the background 'habitat' shots are least 'fussy' (e.g. seabirds, raptors shorebirds and so on). Certainly multiple images posed amongst a busy background of vivid foliage would quickly induce confusion if not a a headache! Perhaps the desired effect, presumably a suggestion of preferred habitats, could be attained by muting the background.

I also wondered about how bulky such a book might be if it is to give (as suggested) reasonable coverage of all expected (and most less expected) species. I suppose it might be possible to squeeze in the text below the plates (a la the old Audubon photo-handbooks), but that would make some of the individual images really tiny and still limit the amount of usable text. However, surely the alternative - a text-and-plate double page layout - would make the book impossibly large. Either way it looks like a pretty heroic effort and I wish the writer/photographer well - I hope it doesn't run up against production problems,

John