Camera Settings for PRO Wildlife Photography!

IRA chelsea and tony northrop and today we're in beautiful Old Saybrook Connecticut in a nature trail to tell you all about the right camera settings to use for wildlife photos I'm gonna tell you about the shutter speed the aperture your exposure compensation but first the classic debate raw versus JPEG what do you think Chelsea io issue raw plus JPEG but I write my RAW files to my first and fastest card of a dual card slot I like to use the RAW format because there's a lot of high dynamic range situations when you're shooting wildlife what do I mean by high dynamic range I mean really bright subjects and really dark subjects or a combination of both for example a dark bird on a light sky or maybe a bird that is two-toned like an osprey for example we're shooting today they're dark Browns with a white chest so if you're not using the RAW format you may have a hard time bringing down the highlights and bringing up the shadows without losing image quality but raw can cause more problems than it solves you hinted that you were shooting raw to your fast card and JPEG to your slow card because shooting raw creates really big files and that can take a lot of time for the camera to write those big files to the memory card the camera has a little space of temporary storage where it can put those pictures until they write that's called the buffer what happens when that buffer fills up the camera stops shooting and what inevitably happens with many cameras is you'll have the greatest moment the bird will be coming right towards you and it's getting closer and closer to your photos are getting better and better and then your camera goes from click click click click to cook good click and you're like oh my god I missed the shot at the ultimate moment you ran out of buffer space you didn't properly manage your buffer if you are shooting wrong you need to be sure to shoot in short bursts and let your camera catch up but the alternative is to shoot JPEG but be really careful that you nail your exposure if you have a camera with a huge buffer like a Nikon d5 or d6 or a 1 DX or an a 9 then you can probably shoot RAW with no worries but if you have a camera with a small buffer something like a D 7200 or even a 7d from Canon JPEG might be a better option for those fast-moving subjects where you need to shoot a dozens of shots at a time and that's something you should experiment with if you are having problems with having subjects being overexposed and you can't bring down the highlights then definitely consider shooting raw and learning how to just control your buffer let's talk about shutter speed the challenge is you always want to shoot at the slowest shutter speed possible that will freeze the motion because otherwise you're introducing unnecessary noise to your pictures by not letting your camera gather enough light conversely if you shoot at too low of a shutter speed things can seem fine at first but once you zoom in one-to-one you can see that there is enough motion blur to destroy the sharpness of your photo so something that I do is I start at a higher shutter speed I inspect my photos closely and then I'll drop it down until I get the perfect combination shutter speed varies by subject if you're shooting a hummingbird with super fast wings you might be at one eight thousandths of a second a small songbird flying like a Robin or a blue jay I would probably be at one four thousandth of a second big birds like Osprey or Eagle one mm one twenty five hundredths of a second low moving big birds like a vulture you can get away with one one thousandth or one 15 hundredths of a second and then once the birds are perched or for still animals like deer or foxes you can usually get away with one five hundredths or even slower I've been known to shoot birds that were perched at 125th of a second with a 700 millimeter lens using a technique I call the rule of doubles so check out that video to find out how to get the ultimate image quality I hope we got a we've been waiting here and nothing has come around and as soon as we start talking if you like these general wildlife tips and you'd like to learn more about wildlife photography we have an entire book on photography called stunning digital photography and we have an entire chapter dedicated to wildlife photography so please check that out support us and you know what to do when the sun goes down or it's raining outside you stay inside and do sort through and edit your photos photo editing makes a huge difference and we have books on our favorite photo editing tools which are Lightroom classic and Photoshop and those can take your pictures from a five to an eight we're going to share it you better edit it a lot of people think that manual mode is always the end-all be-all that it's the back than if you use it you're a pro well that's not always necessarily true I believe that a pro uses whatever gets the job done and for me that shutter priority and the reason why I like that is because ideally I want to get a bird in action or an animal in action sorry my bird nerdness is showing I've just got bird on the mind so the reason that I use shutter priority is that I'll start at a higher shutter speed say I'm photographing a bird that's flying and then if there's something perched I can very quickly just spin my dial and get it down to a lower shutter speed like one five hundredth of a second to get the cleanest photo for a still bird I put it in auto ISO to make sure it's exposing properly and for me that's the quickest mode to use a lot of people will say manual mode is right you just need to meet her once and then just keep shooting at all of those settings all day but I found that not to be true because the lighting can vary so much if a cloud goes in front of the Sun you can see the the exposure dropped by five or six stops sorry we're a little distracted there's all this wildlife going on around us in the background along those lines thinking of the metering mode I just use the default evaluative metering mode some people will suggest using spot metering and in theory that might work because spot metering looks at a very small part of the frame which you imagined to be the wildlife that you're focusing on and meters the entire scene around that but the challenge is if you have something like an osprey which is dark and light at the same time the spot meter will hit the bright side of the bird and under expose a shot or it'll hit the dark side of the bird and over expose the shot so in a series of shots you'll see these widely varying exposures and it's kind of useless I find you're better off just doing evaluative so you're probably wondering about your focusing mode it really depends on which camera you have when I was shooting with a 5d Mark to a Canon the auto focusing it was a little trickier to use so I'd go with single autofocus mode I would put my focusing point right in the center of the picture and then I would just try to track the animal and take shots as I was getting it in the frame properly now I use continuous autofocus I'm shooting with the Nikon d50 the auto focusing is great and I don't have a problem tracking the focusing I would say start with continuous autofocus and if that works for you then continue using that if there are situations where I'll even switch into manual mode for example if there's a bird and it's nestled in branches and I need to shoot between them sometimes I find it impossible to get the camera to focus on the subject in which case have to switch it to manual and then kind of just fine-tune this dial if I do that manual focus is never especially precise with shallow depth of field so I'll get close and then I'll kind of move lean my body in and out to make sure that I get a couple of shots in focus while just holding down the shutter continuously what about your focusing points what do you like do is I have a very custom setup for that for general shooting I'll use a single autofocus point in the middle because I'm shooting with the Sony a7r four and it has a good subject tracking I will use that subject tracking so if the subject starts in the middle and I want to put it in the left of the frame I can just hold down the AF on button recompose and keep shooting that works great with this specific camera but other cameras might not be able to do that generally on DSLRs your center auto focus point is going to be the most accurate and so with most DSLR as I suggest using a single autofocus point in the middle if you watch our video on back button focus you'll see we suggest using back button focus with two separate buttons one program to do a single autofocus point and the other program to do all auto focus points shooting a bird against a blank sky all auto focus points makes it much easier to keep the bird and focus because it can be so hard to keep the bird centered on an auto focus point when you have to handhold the lens up in the air like that and acknowledge that you're not going to get a hundred percent of the shots in focus sometimes it will focus on the wing tip of the bird sometimes it'll nail the eye you cannot 100% control that especially with a moving subject so you just take lots of shots and then sort through them later and hope one of them turned out that can be heartbreaking I feel for you when you get the perfect moment and it focuses on the butt or a leg we've all been there another focusing tip is to pre focus your lens at the approximate distance that you expect your subject to be we're shooting flying Birds right now and if I shoot something that's up close here and my lens is focused at ten feet away I everything that's a hundred feet away is a complete wash I cannot see anything the camera can focus on it I can't even find it in the frame so I will point my camera at a tree that's roughly the same distance get it focused and then I'll at least be able to see the blurry outline of the bird well enough to be able to focus on it yes so if you're ever trying to take a picture of a bird flying and it's so out of focus your camera can't focus focus on something about the same distance and then try again what shutter mode are you using when you're taking pictures I am using a continuous shutter and on most cameras you can choose between high speed or low speed and you generally want to choose the high speed on any DSLR you want to choose the highest speed setting but it gets a little tricky with mirrorless cameras because cameras like the Sony cameras and the Nikon cameras when you put them into the very fastest mode they stop auto focusing or the auto focus accuracy goes way down so on the Sony I would not use high plus I would limit myself to just high all right that loud banging sound reminds me I like to use an electronic shutter when I'm shooting close to a subject if it's a flying burden as far away the mechanical shutter is better mechanical shutters are better at freezing the motion but electronic shutters are silent and especially for perched birds if you're hiding in a blind and you don't want to be detected that silent shutter can save your shot if you have to use a loud shutter in those situations you might only get one or two frames off before you scare the animal off it does alert the animals I just had an osprey give me a look I started taking pictures and it gave me a hello how could I help you for aperture I mostly just leave it all automatic since I'm in shutter priority mode and it's usually shooting wide open and we'll just stop down appropriately to expose your photo properly I've never had a problem with that when I'm in a blind and I get very close to especially small birds like songbirds that's a very high magnification and that's the depth of field is razor thin to the point where I can't even get the bird itself in focus in those situations I will switch to manual mode with Auto ISO and I will use a higher f-stop until I get the depth of field that I need I'm taking pictures of these beautiful swans out here but I want to make sure that their white feathers are per perfectly exposed that you get all of the detail of their feathers you're gonna hit this exposure compensation button and drop my exposure one stop be sure to review your histogram and make sure it's not peeking and clipping your whites that is pretty much all of the camera settings you need to know about for wildlife if you want to know more about tips for shooting wildlife you can check out our other videos on wildlife and we're gonna have another one coming out about tips on how to photograph animals how to find them how to track them how to understand their behavior to get closer to them so subscribe and stay tuned for that thank you so much for watching once again please check out our books and our videos and our presets if you'd like to improve your photography and help us out we'll see you next time thanks

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 98,305

Keywords: wildlife photography, camera settings, camera settings wildlife, bird photography, camera settings for birds, bird photography tips and tricks, wildlife photography tips, wildlife photography camera settings, aperture, camera mode, shutter speed, f/stop, iso, bird photography for beginners, bird photography settings, flying bird photography, animal photography, nature photography, tony northrup, chelsea northrup, flying birds, wildlife photography settings

Id: 1D6SuMKyuEo

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020