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Had a hawk in the backyard. Took shots 40 ft away with a Nikon on a D3300.
I think these shots look terrible. The lens is nothing like my old Canon 30-210.
Good effort. Shooting birds and other wild critters requires patience, good technique and, often, really long (and expensive) glass.
By way of example, here's a shot I made with a 1.3 crop factor camera, a 1.6X extender and a relatively fast 500mm lens. If you do the math, that's the equivalent of 1040mm. The EXIF data: 1/1000, f/7.1, ISO 640, manual, spot metering. As you can see, the bee isn't sharp. I should have gone to a faster shutter speed. You make mistakes and you learn from them.
You are right save, that bee ISN'T sharp. You should die a slow death!
My OP was more of a how could I do better with what I have? I shot it on auto, I was GREAT on film cameras,
I am terrible at this new stuff. Plus I'm such an idiot I thought I had video - all the little birds were going CRAZY that this brute showed up.
The little birds were going NUTS!!! and I missed it.
From my experience, 60 Plus years.. Most people when they get into photography want to buy as much glass as possible. .usually cheap.. But over my experience having One good long lens and one good wide lens and a walk around zoom are almost all you need. Camera phones have made photography watered down although you can take great pictures with a camera phone.. you can't take every opportunity presented with a camera phone.
This is what I used to get some Humming bird shots off my back deck while recovering from surgery.
Camera Info EXIF Camera Sony DSLR-A700 Lens Minolta/Sony AF 70-200mm F2.8 G Focal Length 200.0 mm (300.0 mm in 35mm) Aperture f/5.6 Exposure Time 0.008s (1/125) ISO 640
To the op... basics.. hold discipline or ideally a tripod.. a decent one.. Also once you know what good is, its easy to see flaws. When I shot film, every shot counted.. not so today so many people become lazy with the basics.
If you let the camera or phone make all the decisions then you cant really expect much. but again if you dont know any better, you might be better off...
soft photos' are either the glass, motion blur ( camera movement ) or slow shutter speed. ( aperture staying open too long because of low light conditions. or wrong manual selection of shutter speed. ISO will correct fopr low light conditions. many of these setting can be manually adjusted on a smart phone as well.
Birds are hard. They are small, far away, usually move, and have lots of feather detail. In this case the bird was still, but light levels still looked challenging. A little post processing can go a long way, but will be difficult with this photo. What I noticed is that the ISO seems to be quite high, which is causing you to lose a significant amount of detail. It will be impossible to resolve the feather detail. The bird itself also seems to be over exposed. If you shot jpeg you won't be able to fix that exposure. So what I'd suggest is:
- Don't try to shoot this in full auto mode (if that was the case)
- Lower your ISO to as close to base ISO as you can.
- Stop down the lens to as close to f8 as you can get if this is a kit lens
- Not sure how stationary this bird was, but you could probably get the shutter speed pretty slow. Maybe 1/200 could work. Maybe even slower with image stabilization or a tripod.
- Expose your image for the bird. The matrix exposure meter is looking across the whole image, not just the bird so you need to adjust accordingly.
- Shoot in RAW if you can as it will give you more latitude to fix things later.
- Crop as little as you can... get closer or use a longer lens
- Sometimes the physics of the camera, lens, lighting, and subject location just won't allow for a perfect shot. Pro wildlife photographers use expensive, long, fast lenses to expand the range of the possible. However, using a tripod and having a still subject can conquer a lot!
Last edited by CrystalRedTed; 04-25-2020 at 01:15 PM.
04-17-2020, 12:36 AM
My 1st thread in this part of CF.
