unable to mount hard drives in /etc/fstab

I am following along in the docs for installing a new hard drive (the drives are formatted and have data, I'm trying to set up in /etc/fstab)

I'm able to mount normally with

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/photos

when trying to enter into /etc/fstab like so:

/dev/sdb1       /media/photos vfat    defaults 0 0

I get this:

~$ sudo mount -a
[sudo] password for jason: 
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

I tried several variations, like ext3, some of the other options listed in the docs, chaning permissions of the mount point, but always got the same error.

I should also mention this machine is dual booted with win8 and the partitions were created in windows, quite some time ago. (have actually re-installed the OS, both win and ubuntu several times and used these data drives)

from fdisk -l:

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048   976769023   488383488    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

and from lshw -C disk:

*-disk
   description: ATA Disk
   product: WDC WD5000AAKS-0
   vendor: Western Digital
   physical id: 0.0.0
   bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
   logical name: /dev/sdb
   version: 01.0
   serial: WD-WMASY5272327
   size: 465GiB (500GB)
   capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
   configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=9eb34acb

any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?? thanks! bp