Bird Photography - SMOOTH Backgrounds DEMONSTRATED In The Field - How To Get Blurry Backgrounds

[Music] oh good a in good morning and welcome to the channel and today's video I'm going to demonstrate how to get those smooth out-of-focus backgrounds that you often see in these images I'm going to show you how to get completely out of focus backgrounds and backgrounds that include a little bit of habitat and I'll show you exactly how to do that today if you're interested to know more about out-of-focus background so did a complete video above that you can click on where I go into the key factors that dictate how you get a smooth background today's video though is in the field and I'm lucky to have some very friendly Robins that will help us today and I'll show you how I go through the steps of achieving these photos from beginning to end hopefully you'll find that interesting I just want to stress that this demonstration I'm giving today is sort of a perfect example I realized birds aren't this time usually and won't perform what these ones are about too but just understand the technical aspects that you can transfer this out into the field into other areas and get the same sort of backgrounds ok so the first thing that you're going to need to get these backgrounds is a telephoto lens you can't really shoot birds unless you've got a telephoto lens it narrows our field of view brings the birds in closer and makes for a pleasing image so you have to have one I would recommend probably 300 millimeters or greater this lens I have here is a 400 millimeter 5.6 so it's a fairly affordable Canon lens beginning lens I did do a review on this lens if you want to view it so we want to demonstrate that you don't need them most expensive gear I do have a 500 f/4 which I will pull out and show you the difference but in today's video I'll demonstrate using this affordable lens because I know more of you will have this type of lens so with the camera it doesn't matter too much to be honest it's the lens that's really important the camera obviously helps but I would highly suggest investing in the good lens and then upgrading the camera later on and today's video I'll be using a Canon 5d Mark 4 which is a full-frame camera and I'll be shooting it 400 millimeter focal lengths so once you've got your lens and you've got your gear the next thing is to isolate your subject so I hop on about this all the time and it's really important so I'm going to show you what I mean by isolating your subject and making sure that there's nothing behind so how I'm gonna do that is I've got this nice little rock shelf here behind me and you can see there's nothing directly behind it so if the bird lands on the edge of this rock there's nothing directly behind it which is good what we want but there is some grasses just a little bit further back and those won't go fully out of focus and they will be in our background and give us a bit of habitat and some layers to our mission that's what we're going for so this is the location that I'm going to use to begin with so we're going to get some Robins on the sledge here and see what sort of shots we can get so we'll set up the camera and we'll get into it [Music] okay so the other important thing is to get ilvl and I mentioned this all the time as you can see I'm down low and this is about the right level get the nice shots okay now that we're set up we need to set our exposure so to do that I actually shoot in manual mode there's no right or wrong way you can shoot an AV or manual and I will do a video later on explaining the difference but for me I'd shoot in manual so currently got changeable light but it's somewhat overcast so if it's overcast I'll generally set the ISO to 1600 that's my starting point on this camera and low-light and then I'll do a aperture of 7.1 we need to adjust our shutter speed and this is often the point that people get confused with manual mode and they're not sure what shutter speed to set to get the correct exposure you may not be aware but on cameras you have an exposure meter and you can see here how it goes from minus 3 to positive 3 and so minus 3 means it's three stops underexposed and three stops over in the middle that's telling us that that is the correct exposure based off the setting that you have I have an evaluative reading which means it takes the whole scene into consideration to give us the correct exposure so now all I need to do is adjust the shutter speed can see here and I depress the shutter it's telling me that I'm a third of a stop over which is kind of exactly where I want as you can see as I adjust the shutter speed this will move so we're now underexposed and we're now overexposed so we just need to dial that shutter speed in to get us to around the exposure that we want now to test that to see if it's accurate as we take a test shot and we check the histogram on the back of the camera so we'll do that so you can see the test shot we can probably push that to the right a little bit more but our shutter speed is reasonably high so I'd actually prefer an aperture of effect to give us a bigger depth of field so I'll quickly change that and change our shutter speed and take a shot so we're currently at 400,000 f8 ISO 1600 histograms looking pretty good so those are the settings I would add let me go with and you can adjust those to whatever you want want more depth of field if you want a high shutter speed that's the beauty of manual you can change whatever you want okay now that we have our settings dialed in we can finally take a better [Music] flame Robin here female so she likes the color of the mail and I don't have really good shots of emails that I'm very happy with this [Music] that's a nice pose [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I just want to explain how the aperture can change how out-of-focus your background is so at the moment we're at an aperture of 7.1 you can see that this green background is out of focus as I'll show you what that actually is all right so the background is this grassy stuff foreground is obviously the rock now with the depth of field with the aperture we have now 7.1 the depth of field is quite narrow and you can see that just the rocks in focus but the grass is out of focus obviously as we move the focus point so now our depth of field is this grassy area and the rocks out of focus so to increase that depth of field we need to change this aperture number so if I change it have a look at the background what happens to it so they go to 18 you can see now we're still focused on these rocks but the background is a lot more InFocus than it was because our depth of field is larger and it's all because of this aperture number so you can sort of change the look of your images based off the aperture just be aware though as you change your aperture number you'll need more light and I would generally suggest having that at around 7.1 or 8 to get this sort of nicest shots [Music] okay so I put the 500 on in the same spot we'll see what the shot supply [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I think it's really important that I show you these four photos that I've taken all from the same place the same camera same settings but four completely different looking photos so this first photo I was standing up pointing towards the ground we had a little jockey winter as you can see we just have no separation whatsoever because of the steep angle that we're at we just can't get that separation and the backgrounds too close so we don't get a smooth background this next shot the bird was too far away so the further away the bird the bigger our depth of field so it just wasn't close enough so I just couldn't create that smooth out of focus background this next one the birds up in the tree and it's got branches coming everywhere and again doesn't matter what we do we can't get a smooth background because of all the branches around the bird and the fourth one really terrible image I've actually had to shoot up into the tree into the sky so we've got sky background we can hardly make out the bird we've got a branch coming through it it's just not a pleasing photograph at all for photographs that don't look very good using the same camera if you compare those four to some of these others that were able to catch this morning by just following those keys a big difference and just goes to show that simply being aware of what you're doing where the bird is you can create substantially better photographs you see this rock here there's nothing directly behind it and then the background is grass so fast to focus on this with the 500 millimeter lens I'll have a look what happens okay so at 7.1 aperture of 7.1 now if I was to focus on the grass in the background so that's the grass background as you can see it's a fair distance away but if we focus on the rock throws that right out see that's how we've got that out of folks background but that's only because that background is a fair distance away well what a fun morning that was we took lots of photos I hope you enjoyed them let me know below which one was your favorite I really hope you saw today how you go about achieving those out-of-focus backgrounds whether it be the completely smooth or the ones with a little bit more habitat ultimately you have the creative ability to create whatever photos you want that's one of the real highlights of bird photography is that you can do it in any way that you please so you just make sure you got that lens make sure your eye level make sure your apertures set and just get out there and have fun the more you do it the better you'll get and the more you'll understand if you want to see more of these videos maybe hit the subscribe button give me a thumbs up if you like this video again leave comments below are two every single one of them I had a lot of fun thank you for coming along with me until the next video bye for now take care

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 29,183

Keywords: low shooting angle, bird photography lenses canon, bird photography canon, canon 5d mark iv, canon 500f4, cameras for bird photography, photographing birds, Canon, Birds, how to take photos of birds, bird photography tips and tricks, bird photography techniques, wildlife photography, how to get blurry background in photo, Out of focus background, How to create smooth background, Depth of field, bird photography smooth background, Amazing Background, Bird Photography

Id: kWVNLXtK6Rk

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020