Bird Photography Shooting Modes Explained - Auto ISO or Manual, Does It Really Matter for Wildlife?

g'day and welcome to the channel I often get asked what shooting mode I use when I'm photographing Birds so I thought in today's video I'll share with you what all the modes are that are available what the pros and cons are and give you some suggestions of what settings to use so the modes I'm talking about aperture priority shutter priority manual mode and manual plus auto ISO so these 4 shooting modes all ultimately dictate your exposure or allow you to put settings into the camera and take a photo I don't want this video to be about what's better or worse or which one you should use you can take good photos in any of these modes I want you to be able to go out with confidence and try these different modes and see which one suits your style the best at the end of the day you should just use the mode that you're most comfortable with of course people are going to say manual gives you the most flexibility and that's true but if you're new and you're confused and you don't feel comfortable with it then starting out with one of these automatic exposure modes may be the best way to go so of those 4 modes three of them are automatic exposure the only one that isn't is manual so manual was a manual exposure the other three the camera will set the exposure for you so in my previous video I talked quite a bit about light value and the amount of light that is available when you take a shot all I mean is is before you hit that shutter the camera has to take a reading to see how much light is available to expose that photo that all dictate which settings you can use those settings being your aperture your shutter speed and your ISO how do we know what settings to use when we were taking photos so I've created this chart with the settings that I typically use with my Canon 5d Mark 4 which is a full frame body and it handles ISO pretty well so in a dark scene like a rain forest or heavy cloud or say the fog that I've got today you would have to use ISO s in the range of 1600 to 12,800 and you'll end up with very light slow shutter speeds and 125th to say 500 and you'll ultimately be using from your max aperture out to about 7.1 and a couple of my videos I said your shutter speed should match your focal length and ideally that's the case but when you're shooting in very low light you're kind of going to throw the rules out of the window all you're trying to do in real low-light is get a photo when you've got a medium seen brightness it's starting to get a little bit easier talking about overcast and say some shade and first light now you can use ISOs from about 800 to 3200 your shutter speeds are getting up towards sort of eight hundredths of a second and you can push your aperture out to about f/8 and the final scene is when it's bright this is the ideal scenario because your camera performs best with lots of light when you've got a bright scene you can pretty much use whatever settings you want that's what in direct sunlight etc you'll be able to have high shutter speeds low ISO and a good aperture which will result in the best photos alright so I've got another diagram on the screen showing all the available shooting modes to us the first three on the left there those are all what I would call automatic exposures the camera is ultimately setting the exposure so we've got shutter priority and that mode the user so you you set the shutter speed and the ISO and the camera chooses the aperture on aperture priority you set the aperture and the ISO and the camera chooses the shutter speed and manual plus auto ISO you set the aperture and the shutter speed and the camera sets the ISO so as you can see in all these three modes you'd set to settings the camera chooses the other one and makes the exposure and in manual you choose all three settings so the main advantage of the automatic exposure modes is that if the light is changing and you're moving around a lot the camera will adjust the exposure based on how bright the scene is and with manual you have to actually dial in the correct settings for every single scene that you shoot and when the light changes and that can be pretty overwhelming for a lot of people and they would much prefer if you're walking around or the lights changing just to let the camera do the exposure and you can concentrate on taking the photos so those are sort of the main benefits of the auto exposure modes and when I started out I shot an aperture priority because this manual plus auto ISO wasn't available on the older bodies so if you are shooting on a older crop body and you can't find this auto ISO unfortunately they just didn't have that facility all new cameras do but the older ones didn't ask the question to all my lovely subscribers on YouTube and this is the results they gave us as we can see nearly half of the people responded saying they use manual plus auto ISO very few used aperture or shutter priority and then quite a few also used manual if we can set two of the three settings what two are the most important for wildlife well for me aperture is extremely important because it controls our depth of field we don't want the camera setting say f-22 and the backgrounds might be blurry and we don't want it to narrow because then we lack a depth of field so we want to set the aperture so I would always recommend setting your aperture so say we set that at f/8 the next thing that we really want to control is our shutter speed because if it's too low we'll get blurry photos and motion blur so we say we'd set our shutter speed it's a 1 1000 that means the ISO is that's the last thing and I think letting the camera handle that is the best of the three auto exposure modes so manual plus auto ISO is the one I would suggest and let's have a look at how that works so how auto ISO works as you set the aperture and the shutter speed the camera then takes a reading of the scene to get a light value to know what ISO to use to get a correct exposure so have a look at the scene see what sort of brightness you have goal in the settings have to press the shutter and this will show you what the camera believes is the correct exposure the ISO all should pop up if that ISO is really high you've then got to reduce your shutter speed or open up your aperture those are the decisions you have to make until you get that ISO down to something that you're happy with and that's how it works you have to you've got a you could have be willing to change those settings you've got to check see what the ISO is and dot and change it when you're an auto ISO mode you set the range that the camera can use the ISO range so 100 being the base rate and then most cameras will go up to 30 mm or more some people will set the ISO range to what they want so they may go we'll only want to go up to 3200 and they'll set their range from 100 to 3200 that's a bit of a mistake I believe and that can lead to really dark photos if you have a max ISO set of 3200 and your camera needs more than that and you try and take a photo it's going to be really dark because the camera just can't get the light then you then use this ISO number as a guide if your ISO number is say twelve thousand eight hundred you know that you've got to do something about your settings if you had the maximum of 3200 you wouldn't know how much you need to alter your settings I know that's confusing but just trust me set it to 32,000 and then you can alter your settings to get the correct exposure later on and then on the camera itself you to get into auto ISO you can do it on the back of the screen with the canons by hitting Q and then heading the ISO and just sliding to the left until it says a and you can even do it on the top of the camera those by putting the ISO and then dialling in until it says eh that means auto ISO and then you can take photos that way I've mentioned the metering a couple of times so all cameras will have a light meter and they're pretty advanced and they they read the scene and figure out how bright it is and what settings to use there's three main meter modes on cameras and you may have heard of these before and I'll check them up on the screen the most common one is what we would call evaluative and Canon terms and that is when the camera takes a reading of the entire scene but places a lot of emphasis around the focus point so it's reading the entire scene and it determines what the brightnesses and sets the exposure that's the one that is the most common and probably most used for wildlife because it gives you the best general exposure the next one is center-weighted where it takes the reading from the center of the frame because the majority of subjects are in the middle of the frame and if you want the exposure to be more accurate you've possibly look at that the danger of center waited and I've never actually used this mode is that your bird often isn't actually you've directly in the middle of your frame and if it's not accounting for the bird that's not ideal so there's probably one I wouldn't really suggest the third one is spot metering this is where the camera will take a very small reading between one and five percent of the entire scene it begins at just the very center of your frame but you can change your camera to use the focus point which is what I would suggest so wherever you focus the camera will take a reading around your focus point and then set your exposure so you camera will then take an exposure you would use this say when you've got white birds on a dark background that when cameras get really confused but if your metering off a white bird and theory the exposure will match that white bird I very rarely used that mode to be honest because we're changing all the time and if you're on spot meter and you forget your exposure might be out so it's often easier to use the values of metering mode okay so once your cameras metered the scene it's taken the photo and we think happy days but we check the back of the camera and we notice that the photo is actually slightly underexposed and you might be wondering or why is that photo underexposed that the cameras picking the exposure well the cameras really just taking an average of the brightness of the scene and so I can often get it wrong and I find in certain situations definitely in low-light the cameras do moment generally underexposed shots by even up to nearly two stops so we need to be aware of what the camera is doing and how do we do that well we read the histogram either in the viewfinder on a mirrorless or on the back of the screen on a DSLR did a whole video on histograms that you're free to watch but I used the histogram as a guide to setting the correct exposure and you can do that by using exposure compensation so say you take a photo and it's too dark we need some way to brighten the scene or some way to tell the camera I want it brighter we need to increase the exposure and that's where our exposure compensation comes in so on all cameras they have an exposure level indicator and on the canons it's on the top and obviously on the menu and you can see on the screen I've created it here you've got from minus 3 to positive 3 but in the middle that's what we call the standard exposure so when you're in an auto exposure mode the middle is always going to be what the camera thinks is the correct exposure so when you hit the shutter it's always going to be on the standard this is what the camera sets but say you want it brighter well we need to tell the camera to make it brighter so if we dial in +1 exposure compensation we now move that level indicator to the number 1 which is positive 1 so every time we take a photo the camera is going to add a stop the cameras going to make it one stop brighter now if the scene was too bright so say you had a white bird on a dark background the cameras will generally blow the whites on those birds so to make the scene darker so we don't want to blow the whites we were then dialing - one exposure and that's how we deal with exposure and all in these automatic modes we ate we diet we increase it or decrease it depending on the scene whether we want it brighter or darker it can be a little bit tricky to set this exposure conversation so I'd highly recommend maybe reading the manual or having a look on the canons you can either do it on the back of the screen by hitting cue and then going to the exposure level indicator and just changing it left or right or you can use the buttons on the camera you can hold down the set button on the back and then use the dial and this will also allow you to increase or decrease the exposure compensation so you could just ignore exposure compensation and just go with what the camera tells you you know and that's okay but I would implore you to get out and try to get the correct exposure every time because it will improve your photos so the final mode is manual mode and this is probably one people find the most daunting when starting out I know I did I tried it failed miserably just couldn't get it to work and I used aperture priority for a number of years it wasn't until I figured out how to read the exposure meter and the histogram that has started to make sense and I started to be able to use manual with confidence so to use manual mode you put in the M on your dial if you're using auto ISO you already on the M in manual mode even though the camera doesn't set the exposure you still can use the light meter as a guide to what the exposure should be so as I've mentioned you've got that Expo exposure meter on the top of the camera once you dial in the settings which you think are correct based on how bright the scene is you can um use that as a guide to see how close or far away you are from what the camera thinks is the correct exposure so let's say I set my ISO at 1600 aperture at f/8 and a shutter speed of 1 400th and I was in a sort of a medium brightness if I have to press the shutter I can then read the meter to see what the camera thinks is the correct exposure if I'm fairly close to sort of that one or just under the one I use that as a bit of a guide and then take a photo and I check the histogram how does my histogram look if my histogram is too dark then I'll alter my settings and till my mr. graham looks right once I have my histogram looking right I can take photos and know that I've always got the correct exposure one last thing I need to really mention is one setting that you have to have and that is your high light exposure warning or they call it Blinky's which is a bit funny but what you can do is this settings on a camera but once you take a photo if you over expose it or blow the whites it starts flashing on the back of the camera and by turning that on if you take a photo and then check the back of the camera and it's blinking at you you know that you're overexposed when you need to darken your scene if you're an automatic exposure then you put it need to use some negative exposure conversation and if you manual and you need to change your settings before I knew how to read a histogram I used to just go off the Blinky's if it wasn't blinking that I knew that wasn't blowing and that's what I used for years so maybe that's something that you could try as well if you're struggling with histograms just make sure that you've got the highlighter exposure wanting on and that it's not blinking at you then you know that you haven't blown the whites so I'm going to do a future video where I'll actually go way out into the field and I'll go through these steps and show you exactly what I'm doing I'll try the different shooting modes and you'll be able to come along with me and see how I do it so at the end of the day the shooting mode is just a way for the photographer to set the exposure and I implore you to try them all but ultimately just go with the one that you find the easiest to use don't feel like you have to learn manual or you're not a good photographer if you're not using manual it's just complete rubbish I used aperture priority for probably six years and took some of my best photos in that mode most of my photos were shot in aperture priority and I know plenty of people that still shoot in aperture priority and even myself occasionally I do so it's not a competition just know how to get the best out of whatever shooting mode you're using and have fun so I'd love to hear in the comments what shooting mode you use why do you use it maybe what trouble you having with manual mode is there anything I can help you with I'm happy to answer any questions you leave below if you like this content please give it a thumbs up please subscribe if you want to see more of these videos so I went past 5000 subs recently was just just amazing I'm really humbled I'm very appreciative that everyone's supporting the channel and you're liking this content there's any videos you'd like me to do maybe leave it in the comments below but until the next video thank you very much for watching take care happy birding and see you later if you follow the foot if you follow these if you follow the if you follow the steps I'm a bit what's a cool highlight exposure morning highlight and current jut I'm going to so the brighter the scene the hardwood bites changing drastically and they don't want to miss a shot she's got some birds flying around yep [Music] so basically I'd

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 27,313

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography, wildlife photography, nature photography, bird photography tutorial, Light Value, exposure, Manual Mode, Auto ISO, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Wildlife Photography Shooting Modes, exposure compensation, metering and highlight warnings, Blinkies, Highlight Alert, Evaluative, Centre-weighted, Spot metering, Light meter, exposure meter, automatic exposure, manual exposure mode, Canon cameras for wildlife

Id: UW_XsMYucZ8

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020