How To Nail The Shot - Tanzania Edition

[Music] hey everyone steve from backcountry gallery here this time around we're going to try something a little bit different one of our viewers had suggested that maybe i should do a video where i'm showing different photos and kind of give you why i shot the photo the way i did what settings i used what field techniques i use things like that and i thought that was a great idea so we're going to try it i have eight images from tanzania and i took this trip just a couple of weeks ago so these are very recent images and i'm just gonna kind of give you the background behind those images and why i shot them the way i did and we'll just see how this works out if you enjoy this please let me know in the comments and we'll do more of these otherwise uh this will just be a one-off and it was a nice try right so let's go ahead and dive right in okay so for our first shot we have a couple of young lions fighting and they're not really fighting these are siblings and they're kind of just playing what happened is the young male went down to get a drink and the female got up and she followed him down there and then she grabbed him by the scruff of the neck as soon as i saw that i reached over and i grabbed the a1 with the 200 to 600 on it because i knew i was going to need that zoom because they're going to be all over the place and sure enough that's what happened so let's talk settings real quick with this one so this was at 312 millimeter one 2500th of a second and iso 8000 now the iso 8000 isn't so great but that's because of the f 6.3 in this case i would have loved to have had like a 200 to 400 or 180 to 400 that had you know the f4 maximum opening rather than 6.3 but i had what i had with me but still the zoom was more important in this case than a fast maximum aperture not that that wouldn't have you know been very welcome but i had the 600 f4 it was just too much lens and you can kind of guess that by looking at this photo that would have been a lot of lens there and i wanted to include all the animals and one thing i've learned anytime i have animals that are either fighting playing tussling whatever they're doing i always like to have those zoom lenses because they allow me to kind of manage that crop no matter how fast the action is occurring a lot of times if i'm using a prime it just doesn't work out quite as well when there's a lot of action so i definitely prefer zooms for that and although it was iso 8000 topaz did a really good job i had to use a couple of different methods from topaz and a couple of different layers and kind of blend them together in photoshop but it all worked out pretty well the other thing i really liked about this setup is i was using the a1 and obviously a lot of cameras are coming out with really high frame rates like the a1 but the 20 frames a second really helps here because it allows me to capture just exactly that moment that i'm after in this case i have shots before and after this that are all good they're all keepers you know at a certain level but this is the better keeper if that makes sense i really like the position of the noses here i like the proximity to each other here i like the position of his paw out of all of the shots this was really the best of the bunch and like i say that's 20 frames a second and you can tell the difference between each one of them but overall i really like how this one worked out and i think one other lesson with this shot though was to really trust your guides when you're someplace like africa where you're not as familiar with the animals as they are because there's a couple of male lions not too far away and when we came upon this group here they were all sleeping and so were the males so it's like well how do you know which group to stay with right and so we asked our guide i said what would you do and he says i would stay with these guys even though the males are prettier he says i would stay with these guys because there's more lines where dusk and he says i think we're going to see some activity here and sure enough he called it right so sometimes it really pays to listen to those guys when you're on those trips so anyhow let's move on next we have a european roller going after what i think is a termite i'm pretty sure that's a termite and what had happened is we were driving along and we kind of came to this area where again i believe these are termites they're all flying around and these rollers there's a couple of the rollers there's a couple of starlings a couple other birds they're all flying around trying to catch these termites and this is one of those times it's such a great opportunity we stopped and we stayed there probably half an hour 45 minutes with these birds as they were diving and swooping and going after these little termites in the air and i got really lucky in the in catching this shot here because i tell you i didn't even know i had it and i'm looking through my images and the one before it no termite one this one had the termite the one after it no termite so again we talked about high frame rates with the last shot and once again it paid off here this was at 20 frames a second and this is the only one that had this particular you know beak open and termite in the shot at the same time so that was really really cool uh another good lesson here is sticking with the animals a lot of times when people especially if they're not familiar with an area they'll come across something like this where the opportunity is like really really good but they don't really appreciate the opportunity at the time so they get a few shots and then they move on i see that happen a lot in workshops i'm always kind of emphasizing you know this is really good we want to stay here this is a really great opportunity so whenever you come across something that seems like a really good opportunity definitely stick it out because this was far from my first sequence i got a lot of beautiful shots of these guys in flight but this is the one and this was towards the end of the of the session there this was the one that really stood out now really quickly as far as shutter speed and f-stop and things like that this was shot with a 600 i shot this wide open at f4 it was at iso 1000 which is actually a little underexposed i messed that up i probably should have been at 1600 and i was at 1 4 000 of a second though and i had such a fast shutter speed because these guys are swooping and diving and going after these little tiny termites and it is very difficult sometimes to keep the camera on the bird so your tracking isn't going to be as good as it would be for something slow that was going by very easy so you definitely needed a little bit faster shutter speed here and it definitely paid off next we have this cute little lion cub and i absolutely love photographing lion cubs in africa one of my favorite things to do and one of the questions i get quite frequently in fact i just got it today in fact that's why i included this guy in this video is how do i get eye level shots when i'm shooting from a safari vehicle because if you've ever seen photos of a safari vehicle or even been on safari you probably know that people like to shoot out of the top of those things right and the problem is that really does a lot of times you're shooting down on the animal and it looks like you're shooting down on the animal makes it very difficult to get an eye level looking shot so let's talk about that with this little guy so in this case what we did is we kind of used the terrain to our advantage and the driver parked a little bit downhill from him so we were shooting kind of right at eye level when he was at the window and that's the other thing is everybody in those safari vehicles everyone for whatever reason seems to migrate towards the top and shoot down because i mean it's a lot more comfortable it's easy it's more flexible but the trick is if you really want to get those eye level shots shoot from the window shoot from the base of the windows as much as you can that brings you much much lower and gives you a much better chance of getting something that looks like it's at eye level the other trick is to use longer glass try to have your driver park out a little bit farther so you can use longer glass the longer the lens is and the farther back you are the more it's going to look like you're shooting at eye level rather than shooting you know steeply down at them with like a 70 to 200 or something like that so this was shot at 600 millimeter but we definitely could have gotten close enough for something like you know a 300 millimeter or 70 to 200 even but we didn't because we wanted to stay back to maintain that eye level look so shutter speed wise 1 500th of a second because we're at iso 3200 the light's getting low here and i didn't want to push it too far but it was plenty for this particular shot one other thing if you notice just to the left of his paw there in the frame you'll see a piece of grass sticking up they were all over the place in varying heights it was a nightmare to shoot these guys because they were going through the grass and there's always something blocking them so one trick when you get into that kind of situation whether it's with a lion cub or whatever you're shooting you know birds in a tree whatever monkey's moving through something anytime you're in a situation where you have a lot of obstacles one of the keys is to not look away from the viewfinder stay with that animal because every now and then it comes out into an open spot and you only have a split second to grab it so you don't want to be looking away from the viewfinder waiting for it you want to be on the animal the entire time and that's what happened here unfortunately i had the little flowers right there in the in the frame too so this worked out really really well so next we have this flamingo coming in for a landing and this was at the in gargoyle crater and i had seen flamingos flying there before and i thought boy i would really like to get one of those in flight there's some mountains i thought that would make a nice background and i had this kind of this preconceived idea in my head and one trick with photography is to sometimes let go of those preconceived ideas because sometimes mother nature is going to give you something better and that's i think what happened here what happened is i didn't realize i'm not familiar with flamingos at all so this is my really my first time shooting them and i didn't realize a lot of times when they come in for a landing they kind of run off their speed so they'll come in and they'll touch down and they'll kind of run to slow down if that makes sense they're kind of decelerating through you know by running across the top of the water like this and it makes for a really interesting shot especially if you can catch the splash like you see in this photo here so we have the splash kind of erupting we have that nice arc coming over to his foot and then that leads you right your eye right back up his leg over to his head and it's just it's really a really neat way to get him and something i hadn't planned on and i think that's one of the big lessons with this photo in a lot of photos is i say so many people go out and have this preconceived idea what they want sometimes you got to just kind of embrace what's there because it might be a lot better than what you had originally thought of the other good lesson with this particular image was that once you decide to get something sometimes it's good to stick with that plan we had tried to get flamingos a day before and we got distracted on the way there they were quite a ways from our camp probably a half an hour minimum and you know when you're in a really target rich area sometimes it's very hard to drive by things and the first morning we were unable to resist stopping by some lions and some other birds and stuff and we never got to the flamingos so you know and this morning we said hey you know we're going to do it we're going to run down there no matter what unless it's you know something absolutely extraordinary we're not going to stop till we get to the flamingos and it's a good thing we did because it really paid off had we stopped for some of the other things along the way the light would have been too harsh by the time we got there we would have missed the shot the other thing that was happening with these flamingos uh kind of goes with preparation because we weren't getting a ton of flight shots you know there's probably three or four opportunities all morning for flight chats this was one of them and so you have to be very prepared and very aware of your surroundings when you're in that kind of situation because what happens is you see these other flamingos and these other birds out there and you're photographing them and then a flamingo comes flying in so you have to be able to react really fast and switch to the settings that you need to capture that particular image thankfully on the sony a1 i know other cameras do this as well i have a user setting that allows me to get into action mode basically i have it set for 1 30 200th of a second lens wide open and that's why we have the shutter speeds and the things we do here uh it's 1 3200th of a second f4 and iso is only 160. now normally maybe i would have gone a little faster shutter speed since the iso was so low but i didn't have time all i did was i switched the little dial to that user mode so that i could catch this coming in and by the way that user mode also uses for your sony shooters if you wonder how i'm doing some of this stuff i have it set to zone tracking on that one as well so but in any event that's the kind of the story of the flamingo let's move on okay next we have this photo we have a couple of little cheetah cubs here and quite a few things to talk about with this one i think the first is i think the biggest lesson that this photo has is to watch what else is going on so many times i see people focus on just the one animal in the frame or the one thing in the frame that they're after and they don't look at anything else and in this case i saw the other little cheetah up there so i want to make sure that i included him because he was looking down at his brother there and i think it's a really really cute shot and you know i say i see so many people they would only focus on the one that you see here on the left rather than trying to get the whole story with the other little cheetah cub in there and i think the other cheetah cub looking down at him really really kind of tells a better story than just him sitting there staring towards the camera so always kind of keep an eye out for that type of stuff and it's not necessarily always just another animal either it could be just you know part of the environment that's kind of balancing out the photo and you know for yours with your subject so it's you know you don't always have to have just the subject in there you can have some other stuff in there that kind of helps balance it and maybe tells a little bit better story i think the other thing with this photo is that i think it demonstrates pretty well that you don't necessarily have to have everything razor sharp in focus in the image in this case in fact i think it's better that he's sharp and his brother is out of focus i don't think it would work quite as well with his brother and him both sharp because your eye would bounce back and forth in this case you clearly know that my primary subject is the little guy there on the left and the brother is just kind of an accent to that i know people get kind of hesitant to take a shot if they can't have every little animal in the photo sharp but the thing is when we're dealing with long glass and stuff like that if i would have shot this at f 22 that little guy still wouldn't have been razor sharp in the back it's just too much of a distance there the depth of field is just too shallow so again we talked earlier about working with what you have and in this case i think this works out really really well now i do have stacking techniques where i could have gotten both of them sharp and i have a video that will demonstrate that if you want to take a look i'll put it in the card above so you can take a look at how you can get multiple animals sharp in a frame but in this case i think it works way better like this now the other interesting part about this are the settings this was taken in the evening we were coming back to camp it was really getting kind of dim this is just i believe slightly after sunset and this was with a 600 millimeter at only 1 60th of a second and the iso was at 800 even at f4 so i mean we would really slow down the shutter speed and in cases like that i tend to shoot a little bit extra to make sure that i can get at least one with a nice sharp eyeball which of course you know obviously you wouldn't be seeing this if i didn't you know wasn't able to pull that off but anyhow that's kind of what i was thinking as i was shooting these little cheetahs next we have this cool little barn owl and our guides found him kind of tucked into an area kind of between a couple of big rocks so he found like a little kind of a slot canyon there if you want to think of it like that a miniature slot canyon and he was all the way at the back of it we had some light coming down from above but not much in fact that's kind of the big story here and i kind of alluded to it a little bit with the cheetah cubs but i really want to talk about it here because that's the really the big story with this photo now in my other videos i have talked about and in my books and articles i talk about kind of iso management and iso insurance meaning basically what i do is i start off at a faster shutter speed and obviously giving i'm going to have a higher iso i take a few shots make sure i have a sharp one then i ratchet down that iso and i repeat the procedure and get as low as i can with shutter speed and consequently as low as i can with iso now if we take a look at this one you can see that the shutter speed was only 1 50th of a second at five six using a 600 millimeter in a teleconverter and the iso was 2500 even at 150th of a second at five six so this was fairly dark inside this little tunnel where this guy was so not super easy to pull off and in fact though i would have gone to even slower shutter speeds but i wasn't able to we'll talk about that in a second but anyhow so what i did is i started off at i think maybe 400th of a second or 320 or something like that but my iso was like 12 800 and it was just eating up the feather detail wasn't really good so you know i got an i got a reasonably sharp shot so i knocked that down then i got another reasonably sharp shot and i knocked that shutter speed down and i got down to 150th of a second and as i'm knocking this down what i'm doing is as i'm shooting is i'm taking longer and longer bursts so that you know maybe i have 20 shots and maybe one of them sharp but i know if i take 40 shots i'm gonna have two of them sharp so i keep knocking that shutter speed down and keep increasing the number of frames i'm taking so that i can get maybe one or two really really sharp images at that lower iso now another problem here i would have tried to go lower than 50th of a second but unfortunately it was like really windy out there that day and the wind was kind of rattling the truck a little bit so it was and it was constant there was just no you know ebb in there out in the open serengeti like that so the truck is constantly kind of vibrating from the wind because i did try lower shutter speeds and i just didn't get the level of sharpness on any of those shots that i wanted so this was actually after i went back up to 150th of a second saying okay this is about as low as i can go but anyhow to kind of summarize this if you're in a situation where you're facing a pretty high iso try ratcheting down the shutter speed and then lowering the iso to go with it and go as low as you can and as you get into those slower and slower speeds shoot more frames because it's going to give you a better chance of getting something sharp next we have this beautiful male lion and this was actually taking kind of a midday hazy sunshine kind of light and it's a nice close crop and we're going to talk about why all of that is the way it is so let's first let's talk about the settings here uh it's a we use the 600 millimeter with a 2x converter 1 1600 of a second this is again it was a kind of a windy day and the truck is kind of moving a lot and people are excited and they're moving around in the truck and f8 because i was using the 2x converter and iso 1250 so not too unreasonable for the iso right there and the thing is the reason i chose what i chose here was because he was in front of a very busy background the background was very confusing very busy the a lot of sticks and leaves and everything else and it was directly behind him it was very very close so what i decided to do and what i often do in situations like that is i forgo the full body shot because he was kind of pretty he was laying down he was laying out like that but the background was just blowing it so what i do in situations like that is i often try to get as close as i possibly can so instead of just using the 600 or even you know something like 400 millimeter and getting the whole lion what i did is i said let's go all out i grabbed the 2x converter put it on the 600 millimeter and cropped in really really tight right on his face there right on his face and neck area here and did this shot instead so i pretty much used his body to kind of eliminate all of the busy background and come up with a shot that i could actually use so i think that's a really that's a really really good trick there when you run into situations like that and the other thing is if you'll notice it's black and white and one of the reasons i like to use black and white especially in conditions like this is because as i mentioned we're just in kind of a midday hazy overhead sunlight the color of the light isn't anything special in fact it's kind of dull so you know in situations like that a lot of times people put away their cameras and say you know the light's not very good and the colors don't look very good i'm not really interested in it but you know depending on the circumstance though you know if you have nice more or less workable manageable light like i say hazy overcast even if the color's not good sometimes it really lends itself to a nice black and white and i think it worked out really well here finally we have this leopard and i think this is one of my favorite shots of the trip we found her kind of driving back to camp one morning and she was just hanging on this branch right in the middle of a trunk with nothing else around which is super rare most of the time when you find these leopards they're up in the thick of it they're up in the branches and there's you know branches behind them branches in front of them branches across their face it just looks awful and it's very very difficult when you run into that with this girl she's just hanging out on this single dead branch the single broke broken off dead branch you can see where it broke off in the frame there she's hanging on this and she's completely exposed out in the open and on top of it she wasn't overly habituated so when we pulled up she was really paying attention to us sometimes when you have animals that are really habituated you can clap you can whistle you can yell it doesn't make any difference at all they've heard it and they ignore you the entire time with her we pull up and she's looking directly at the camera the entire time that we're shooting so it was really really fun to photograph her so here's the situation though when we pulled up because she was kind of out in the open we had the trunk behind her but on either side it's just basically white sky so she's in the shade and it's working really well it looks really good but if you get the edges they're bright white and your eye always goes towards the brightest area of the frame so i don't want your eye going to those white skies patches i want them to go straight to you know her face so what i did is i grabbed the 600 added a 2x converter to it so i'm at 1200 millimeter and that's when i went in there and was photographing this nice tight shot this is not a crop this is virtually what i saw in the camera right here and i think it works out really really well and in addition i kind of wanted to showcase her because i think that her coloration is really really pretty so i really wanted to kind of getting close to showcase this little real subtle coloration that you have a lot of leopards have a little more orange in them than this but her coloration was just this nice subtle very soft oranges and that and i wanted to really showcase that i thought it looked good up against the tree trunk there so the tight crop worked not only to get rid of the sky but i also think it's a better representation of the leopard here so a lot of times again people get so concerned about having the entire animal in the frame but sometimes getting a little bit closer or using more focal length to really get in and kind of focus on the stuff that you feel is important in this case i wanted to showcase her eyes and i wanted to showcase her coloration and i think getting in closer really did the job there so there you have it i hope you enjoyed this video please let me know in the comments if you did or if you think there's something i could do a little bit differently or better with this style of video and if you did enjoy them i will definitely do a few more of these for you of course i hope you picked up a few tips and techniques along the way as you watch this video but keep in mind my educational materials are absolutely brimming with all sorts of tips advice and field techniques all of it's time tested all of its stuff i use in the field every time i'm out make sure you check out those educational materials we have books we have videos you're absolutely going to love it and honestly they're priced super reasonable you can get them for less than the price of a lunch date at mcdonald's so make sure you check them out also make sure you stop by the site and sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss one of these videos one of my articles one of my workshop opportunities anything like that and finally and as always please make sure you like subscribe and get notified thank you so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 26,572

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, wildlife photography, wildlife photo, wildlife photography tips, wildlife photography help, wildlife composition, wildlife close ups, wildlife photography mistakes, improve your wildlife photography, animal photography composition, Africa wildlife photography, Serengeti wildlife photography, wildlife example images, wildlife photography techniques

Id: AB6h_10Ne0A

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021