Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO Explained for Wildlife Photography - What Settings to Use for Wildlife

when photographing birds i want to capture the sharpest images with the highest possible quality to do this i need a well-exposed image a good exposure is created using three camera settings aperture shutter speed and iso the key for any photographer is understanding what these settings do which combination to use and why in today's video i'll attempt to explain just that all right the first setting we're going to talk about is your aperture inside your lens are some aperture blades and these blades control how much light enters the lens and hits your sensor so as the aperture number gets bigger the blades close in and less light can hit your sensor let's start with the f-stop you'll see this number written on your lens this tells us the maximum aperture that is your widest aperture setting or the lowest aperture number this lets in the most amount of light as you can see with my 500 f4 f4 is the max aperture with the blade wide open it lets in the most light as we stop down or close the aperture the number gets bigger and the amount of light hitting the sensor reduces this can be confusing at first as the lower the f number the bigger the opening in the lens so the obvious question is why don't we just leave our aperture at its widest or its maximum setting and let in as much light as we can there's two main reasons why we don't use our maximum aperture first reason is that lenses aren't their sharpest wide open so what i mean by that is if your maximum aperture is say 5.6 the images are sharpest between say 7.1 and 9. the second main factor which aperture controls is your depth of field so i talked all about this in my smooth background video but if you look at the graphic on the screen you can see that the depth of field is our area in focus the lower that aperture number the narrower that area of focus will be and this can cause issues as you can see with this superb variant on the screen the depth of field on this image was 6.3 and it was just too narrow which has resulted in the perch and the tail of the bird being out of focus and we don't want that we want all of the bird and all the perch in focus if we can if we use a higher aperture number our depth of field increases so more of the bird and the perch will be in focus and as you can see with this next shot it was shot at f8 and much more of the perch and the bird are in focus and this is a better overall image in my opinion so for wildlife for the sharpest possible images i would recommend using an aperture between 7.1 and 9. this will ensure you've got adequate depth of field and the sharpest possible images all right i think it's a good time that we chat about a stop of light and what does a stop of light even mean you've probably heard me use the word stop open it up by stop close it by a stop to stop a light you've heard this over and over again and you may be wondering what exactly that means so stop of light is either doubling or halving the amount of light that's hitting the sensor i know that's confusing but let's have a look at this chart so this is your aperture going from f4 to f22 so at f4 we're wide open so if we move one stop to f 5.6 this lets in half the amount of light so 5.6 is half if we then went up to f8 that's another half of light that we've lost and so overall now we've lost two stops only letting in a quarter of the amount of light that f4 was and as you can see on that chart as we as that aperture goes from f8 f11 f16 we're losing more and more light and it works the other way as well so if we're going from f8 up to f 5.6 we've double the amount of light that's available and from 5.6 to 4 is double the light so whenever we work in stops it's either halving or doubling the amount of light that's available to take a photo this will make more sense as we go because each camera setting your iso aperture and shutter speed all work in stops and they either double or half the amount of light so most cameras are set to work in a third of a stop increments what do i mean by that well if you turn the dial on your camera let's say we're at say 5.6 and we turn the dial we'll go 5.6 6.3 7.1 and then eight so 5.6 to 8 is one stop but 5.6 to 6.3 is a third seven point one is another third and then obviously f eight and you can see on the chart we've got the full stops and then we've got the third of the stop increments the reason we work in third of the stop increments is it just gives you finer control sometimes one stop can just be too much it can make it either too bright or too dark and one-third allows us a gradual change in the exposure which often works better so obviously as we change our aperture number and less light is coming in this is going to directly impact our shutter speed because we can't have the same shutter speed if we don't have the amount of light available so at f4 at a iso of 100 a base iso we had a shutter speed of 1 2 000 but i changed that to 5.6 so we moved one stop so one stop in the shutter speed is half the light so we've gone one two thousand down to one one thousand and as you can see as we move down that chart we go by stop each time our shutter speed is halving at each stop so if we were at f11 we'd only have a shutter speed of one 250th and that's just too slow often for wildlife especially if you're trying to capture a flying bird so you just have to be aware of that when setting your aperture that you have still have adequate shutter speeds and as you can see on that chart we've got this pelican when we're down at our widest aperture the background is quite smooth but as we stop down we can see that the background becomes more in focus as our depth of field increases so i've started at an aperture of f9 as we open up the aperture and we lit in more light you can see that the scene gets brighter and if we go from f9 close down the aperture you can see the scene gets darker which is logical because we're getting either more or less light all right let's move on to the second setting and that's just shutter speed most people are pretty confident with their shutter speed and they understand so i'll quickly go through this basically at the front of your sensor and your camera is a shutter mechanism we have a top curtain and a bottom curtain when you hit the shutter these two curtains go block the light from hitting the sensor and depending on how long your shutter speed is let's say it was one second as we hit the shutter the bottom curtain will drop and one second later the top curtain will drop and the amount of the amount of time that your shutter speed is set for is the amount of time that these curtains open and close letting light hit your sensor so as you can imagine the faster the shutter speed the less light that is able to actually come through and hit your sensor the impact of that is the higher the shutter speed we freeze the action which is logical because if you think about it if we leave the shutter open for a second there's a lot that can happen in a second which can cause motion blur and blurry photos so with wildlife we want the fastest shutter speeds we can get but as those shutter speeds go up the amount of light goes down which can cause us issues when it comes to trying to get a good exposure here's a photo i took of a king penguin coming out of the water i really wanted to freeze the water as the penguin emerged from the ocean and actually used the fastest possible shutter speed i could which was 1 8 000 of a second and by taking that photo i managed to really freeze the action which makes this photo if i used a much slower shutter speed the water would be quite blurry and even the bird might not have been as sharp so that's one technique we have when photographing birds is to use high shutter speeds to freeze the action with static birds i try to keep my shutter speed over 1 400th of a second and with moving birds or flying birds i generally try and keep it above 1600 of a second shutter speed so we have a look on the screen a very simple diagram here that shows you the slower the shutter speeds you may get motion blur and as you can see as our shutter speed increases the amount of light reaching the sensor decreases but we get to freeze the action so that's the balance that we're looking for so rule of thumb has always been whatever your focal length is your shutter speed shouldn't be any lower than that so if you've got a 400 millimeter lens ideally your shutter speed shouldn't be any lower than 1 400th of a second this isn't a hard rule and it's just a guide to try and prevent camera shake and motion blur so just quickly the difference between camera shake and motion blur motion blur is when the bird moves so as you can see with this fairy wren the head has moved at the time of taking the photo and it's blurry but if we look at the feet the feet are sharp and the perch is sharp so only the birds moved if we have camera shake the whole image will be blurry or soft and the higher the shutter speed will reduce the amount of camera shake or the issues that come with that i took another shot that had a really low shutter speed but this time the bird sharp because it wasn't moving the other thing is it is important to know that you can actually capture sharp shots at really low shutter speeds have a look at the satin bower bird i actually photographed this with 1 40th of a second shutter speed which is ridiculously low but because i was steady i was on a tripod the bird hasn't moved i fired off a number of shots at once and a number of them were sharp the issue is is that by using such low shutter speeds the amount of sharp shots drastically reduces you'll still get them the amount of soft shots will increase so it's a real balance so using low shutter speeds is definitely one technique you can use if you're in a rain forest you can get away with the low shutter speeds and by using lower shutter speeds you can use lower iso numbers so back to the stops of light that we were talking about if we have a look at the diagram shutter speeds are fairly simple to understand one stop is basically doubling your shutter speed so we go 125th 250 500 1000 and so on and at each stop we're halving the amount of light that's hitting the sensor so our current shutter speed has the correct exposure and as we increase our shutter speed the scene gets darker because it's faster and there's less light hitting the sensor as we lower our shutter speed it's obviously the shutters open for longer and we get more light the scene gets brighter so as we saw as we increase our shutter speed the amount of light hitting the sensor reduces and the scene gets darker so how do we make it brighter how do we keep those higher shutter speeds well the answer is your iso simply by increasing your iso it makes the scene brighter your camera requires less light to expose the photo so your iso basically amplifies the light hitting the sensor and it no longer needs as much light so what does that mean well it means as you increase your shutter speed you can increase the iso to keep the exposure the same so simply with wildlife if you want higher shutter speeds you just simply increase your iso so if you're in auto iso mode and you put up your shutter speed your iso will go up by the same amount so you might be thinking oh how good is this we just simply keep increasing our iso to get the shutter speeds we want well you can but the trade-off with higher iso is a reduced image quality and more noise i did a whole video on noise which you're free to watch it becomes a point where your iso is just too high and each camera will be different with my 5d mark iv i generally go up to say iso 6400 but i prefer to use 3200 or 1600 and it all depends on how bright the scene is and how much light is available let's have a look at the screen here's three superb fur ends all photographed at three different iso settings so you can see the one on the left is iso 3200 and the one in the middle is iso 1600 so the higher the number the more grain and the less image quality but the 5d mark iv is such a good camera that it's very hard to tell the difference between 1600 and 3200. if i'd shot this say on my old 7d there'd be a lot more noise in these images so the newer cameras handle noise a lot better let's have a look at that superb fairing on the right can you see how much noise is in this image how grainy it is and it just lacks contrast and the bird just doesn't look very good and that's because i used an iso of 32 000 which is really really high and one i would never recommend but i just wanted to demonstrate what noise is and what happens when you really push your iso out interestingly though i actually processed that photo using topaz de noise in photoshop i did a review on topaz some extra software that reduces noise and it actually came up not too bad considering the high iso and would almost be passable for a web version image so your iso works very similar to your aperture and shutter speed it's slightly different though your aperture and your shutter speed they both control their light before it hits your sensor your iso is controlling how the sensor uses the light that's coming in if we go from iso 100 to 200 that's one stop your sensor requires half the amount of light if we then go to 200 to 400 it halves the amount of light it needs again and so on and so on so as you can see when we get out to say iso 1600 the sensor requires 1 16 the amount of light that it originally did and that's quite a big difference and that gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to our aperture and our shutter speed because if the camera only needs 1 16 of the amount of light we can then bump up the shutter speed by the same amount the iso is basically a big help to wildlife photographers as we increase our iso the camera requires less and less light this crested turn shot let's say the aperture was set at f8 and we had an iso 100 will give us a shutter speed of 1 500th of a second and as we double the iso we double the shutter speed all the way down to iso 1600 would give us the shutter speed of 1 8 000 of a second so as you can see there's a direct relationship between your iso and your shutter speed and as mentioned before if you're working on auto iso you just simply increase the shutter speed in your camera or match with the iso increase a very important point that i want to make is you can use numerous different settings to get the same exposure so let's take a look at this beachstone curly photo i photographed many years ago i had bright direct sunlight and i knew i wanted fast shutter speeds to freeze the action i was using the original 7d at the time and i found iso 400 gave me the cleanest files with that camera so i've overlaid six exposure options that will all result in the same exposure or brightness have a look at each combination maybe pause the video and have a guess at which combination you think i chose for the 7d think about each setting we want the sharpest photo with good depth of field we want a shutter speed to freeze the action and we want an iso that doesn't produce too much noise for this old crop sensor camera what did you come up with i actually went with combination number one at the time i was too concerned with noise so i didn't want to go above iso 400 7.1 and 2000 gave me a good shutter speed and gave me adequate depth of field now if i was to shoot the same scene with my 5d mark iv i can obviously bump up that iso by quite a bit let's just say that i bumped it up to iso 800 that would now give me a shutter speed of 3200 and an aperture of f8 which is probably what i would use and that would result in a really nice photo let's have a look at combinations three to six can you see any issues with those settings in relation to wildlife what may lead to some problem so overlay what i believe are the issues so in red are the settings which i would avoid for wildlife and green is the settings that i would suggest if we have a look at combination four the aperture is good f8 so that'll lead to a nice sharp photo with a good depth of field but the shutter speed of 400th of a second is just far too slow and will likely lead to motion blur now the reason we have such a slow shutter speed is we've actually set the iso to 100 which is the highest image quality and requires the most amount of light if we have a look at the image of the beach though curly it would it would probably look like this that is the bird is blurry i think that's a really important point you the photographer can control these three settings and you've got to make sure you're picking the right setting for that situation so what settings should we use well as i've mentioned in previous videos it all depends how bright your scene is brighter your scene the more light that's available so the higher your shutter speeds can be and lower your iso if we have a look at this chart any scene will be dark medium or bright so rain forests overcast direct sunlight and the settings you will use will change depending on how bright your scene is ultimately a good exposure is a balance of these three settings and it's up to the photographer to determine what these settings are i actually think this is a really fun part of photography and it's actually a very creative process because you get to change the settings see how they impact a photo and just have a play around we won't all use the same settings all the time two photographers could use completely different settings depending on what they're going for and i just implore you to get out there and have a go it's the only way you'll really learn exactly what these settings are doing is by having you go yourself i'm just going to quickly tell you how i set my exposure in manual mode i'm currently in my front yard i've got some fairy wrens jumping around here it's the sun's pretty much disappeared so very low light i've just played around with my settings at the moment what i'm going to go with is iso 6400 f 8 which gives me a 500th of a second that should be fast enough handheld so those that iso is pretty high but i like to have that depth of field as mentioned with the aperture and that shutter speed should be high enough so now i've just got to wait for the bird to pop up i've taken my test shot i've checked my histogram and my histogram is looking good so all we need now is a bird [Music] so the fairy ran the fairy ends on top of this tree here on top of this bush so he's just up on here [Music] what i'm trying to do is just change the settings based on the light that's available to try and get the best quality shot i can so in these changing scenarios you know it's at iso 6400 and i dropped down to 3200 because the lights actually improved i dropped my aperture to 7.1 to get the shutter speeds up and i was just playing around as i went there's no hard or fast settings that you have to use every time it's up to you to try heaps of different settings and just see which ones work best for you you know different cameras handle iso differently and that's the joy of getting out and photographing birds and whatnot if you like this content please give it a thumbs up if you've got any questions leave them below i'll answer every single one if you want to see more of this type of content please subscribe i appreciate all the support until the next video thanks for watching take care and bye for now see you all right that brings us on to the second setting and that's your shutter speed i think most people are and with moving birds or flying birds i generally try and keep it above 1 1600 [Music] one sixteen hundredth of a second i took another shot at i took another shot at we we lose another half all right i've created a flowchart of how i go about taking photos in the field first one is actually auto iso exposure that means the camera sets the final exposure you set the shutter speed in the aperture and the camera will set the iso so the first step is to have a look around and determine how bright your scene is if you're in a rainforest or heavily overcast skies then i'd start with the dark settings of 1 320th of a second and maybe your lenses maximum aperture i'll then half depress the shutter and the camera's meter will take a reading and set an appropriate iso setting if this number is higher than iso 6400 then we need to decrease our shutter speed until that iso comes down to 6400 if you had an older camera or you didn't want to use such a high iso you would lower your shutter speed until i had hit the iso setting you were comfortable with maybe iso 3200 now if your iso was lower than 6400 say 1600 then you can either increase your shutter speed or increase your aperture number until that iso climbs back up to iso 6400 or whatever it is the iso that you want so generally you'll want actually shutter speed before aperture and that's the one i'd recommend increasing first as you can see as the brightness changes the shutter speeds and the aperture numbers also increase and this is just because we've got more light available okay this next flowchart is if i was using manual exposure you'll follow a very similar path to the one before you'll check the brightness of the scene you'll dial in those recommended settings the difference now is that i'll actually use a histogram to tell me the brightness of the scene i did a video on histograms that you're free to watch but i basically change my settings until my histogram is exposed to the right and is showing a correct exposure

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 42,991

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, nature photography, bird photography tutorial, exposure, Manual Mode, Auto ISO, Blinkies, automatic exposure, manual exposure mode, Canon cameras for wildlife, Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO, Camera settings for wildlife, best settings for bird photography, Stop of light, Depth of field, motion blur, camera shake, light, Aperture shutter speed and iso explained, Canon 500 f4 lens, Canon 5dmkIV, Wildlife Photography fundamentals

Id: EO0WjbwzirQ

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020