WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY CAMERA SETTINGS: Focusing and Exposure

[Music] well the morning ladies and gentlemen and good to see you all again I'm in this fantastic Bluebird wood in my part of the world in southeast England and the aroma and the scent coming off these blue barrels is absolutely amazing and there's birds nesting everywhere so I thought I'm gonna move my office outside today and why not this video is as a title implied so about birds in flight and wildlife photography camera settings I'm going to talk about my thinking and the thinking behind my settings I'm not going to make it overly technical so I hope that is ok with people and I'm gonna start let's put it into two parts first part on focusing and secondly on exposure I'm then gonna suggest some options including a great go-to setting that will work a lot of the time for most photographers and it's a great place to start to minimize those missed shots and then I'm going to show some slightly more advanced options that hopefully we'll find useful and you can use when the situation develops and you become maybe more experienced as a photographer and honestly those around that guys who are maybe struggling a little bit but our experienced wildlife photographers already and I'm aiming I think this is more at newcomers to wildlife but the settings also apply for sports photography another action photography situations and I think they apply for both I just hope there's something for everybody and I hope you enjoy it before we start I think there are three things that I should say for me at least are no-brainers with regards what every wildlife photographer should be using virtue all the time expecting except in very special situations continuous AF focus which is obviously continuous autofocus whatever the setting on your camera is in Nick on its AFC it's AI servo in Canon Sony as well I think is AFC so continuous servo focus you need to have that set equally have your number to have your highest frame rates per second there's no point having a camera that can shoot at eight frames a second if you don't use it particularly the wildlife it really really helps digital images these are free so you know why not make the most of it and thirdly for me is back button focusing it's there are people who don't like it I find exactly godsend it's where you separate as opposed to out of the box your camera has its focus on the shutter release button so you will focus and press the release to take your picture all you do is you separate the function within the camera the shutter release button becomes just that the shutter release button and you transfer the focus mode onto a button on your back your AF on button invariably I find it's incredibly good for focusing recomposing I didn't start off with it for the first six or nine months and then when I moved to it it takes a little bit of getting used to but I promise very very few people go to it and then come back but if you don't like it and you prefer another method that's absolutely fine but for me personally I find back button focusing for focusing and recomposing and equally it means I can keep any subject in focus all the way through through a particular image I can keep it in focus and then as it appears in the frame that I want to shoot maybe in the particular area of a field where there's less distraction and it's creatively a better image I can simply focus and when I get to the point I can take a picture and so on and the an Utley the subject is in focus all the time so back button focusing AFC continuous focus and your maximum frames a second other three no brain is that you want to have right as I mentioned I'm gonna split this into two subjects focusing his number-one exposures number two focusing is quite we're gonna get whizzed through this is actually relatively straightforward I think there's two key thoughts you can have took in to consider when you're looking at your focusing and one is you want your camera to be as quick as possible in grabbing focus it's really really important that grabs focus as quickly as possible so the more work you give it to do the less efficient it's going to be and the slower it will be to focus this problems exasperated by things like low light generally tricky lighting conditions or sub J that's being really quite erratic so say that's point one we're going to try and give your camera's a little to do as possible so it grabs focus efficiently number two with focusing is very much your physical approach to focusing it is a technique about how you hold a camera how you pan the camera and it's very much like anything else the more you practice the better you'll get and if you get better at physically focusing then your camera will go out grab focus quicker your subject will be in the frame more often therefore you'll get more shots so think about the way you stand you should be balanced you should swing your whole body not your hands and arms the way you breathe out when you take the picture a bit like being you know firing a rifle it really really helps keep your elbows in and one other thing I do quite often is I keep both eyes open because if you are panning or even where they're gonna hide and the cameras on tripod if you can get to do both eyes you can see with your peripheral vision if another bird comes into frame or I had a situation in the bar now is where crows are mobbing them I don't think I would ever notice that until it was too close in the frame and I could see them circling above and I got ready for the shot so again focusing is quite a practical skill whereas you could argue that an exposure which we're going to come onto has an aesthetic quality as well where you the things you do affect the real look of the image whereas focusing is a bit more practical [Music] that nicely brings us on to focus points which is often a big topic of discussion amongst wildlife photographers and the key thing to remember is more points means more work for your camera your camera works on movement and contrast so the less you've got of those two the more it will struggle and my rule is very simple what I recommend is you start with one point of focus and see if that works it will focus very quickly very accurately you can put it on the on the animal or bird's head or face or I whatever you have the options to why would I change the only reason I would changes if you're finding that the subject is too erratic that you physically can't get enough times in focus you know you're missing far too often in which case go to maybe nine or five and experiment with it but if you go right out to say 51 points of focus there's two downsides one is the camera gets slower and the second one is you never know quite when it lacks on the focus if you've got something like a barn owl flying you won't quite know whether it's focused on the front wing tip or the tail or the head or the body and it's very easy to get back into Lightroom and you've been using a wide aperture on your big 500 middle 300 mil lens and you'll notice that none of them although they look okay none of them the head is absolutely pin sharp so with one point of focus I think it's a really good system to you either nail it or you don't but the ones you do get work really well and I say so think worse conditions less points [Music] right if we've were happy we moved on from focusing I hope everyone's okay with that topic number two and probably the bane of more contention than anything is exposure and I probably see more examples of and/or overexposed images which can be readily fixed and for this purpose I'm going to assume that we're using matrix or average metering and whatever you have in your camera as opposed to spotl or center-weighted metering which um which I do use very occasionally for certain subjects but realistically for 99% of wildlife photography matrix metering works really well and as I say what we're trying to do is keep this simple so you don't miss any shots that's the idea anyway and I'm gonna go through the the modes I recommend the methods I recommend in the order I think you're new to wildlife photography I suggest you start this way I'm going to start with aperture priority with the option of exposure compensation and then I'm going to talk about manual and various options from manual methods and finally I'm going to talk briefly about auto ISO which is a fantastic setting which is really really useful and I'll talk about that little bit in depth as well but just a few minutes I'm trying to keep this video as short as I can sensibly and I'm going to show some examples of why I use the different methods after each method I'll talk through those as well which is where I've got that done can you believe it's actually spitting with rain I don't believe it method number one is aperture priority with exposure compensation a lot of shots will occur really quickly and randomly so how do you set up a nice quick response setting that works well for you and I think for me this is where aperture priority works really well as a go-to setting the basis is you control the aperture you set a high enough ISO to ensure that your shutter speed is sufficient for whatever you're doing and the camera then sets the shutter speed so why aperture priority is obviously a lot of beginners will say to me well surely shutter speed is or shutter speed priority is more intuitive because you want to control the shutter speed visits wildlife or a racing car and similar the key thing is your aperture has a big impact on the creative look of your photograph and you want to be able to control that if it goes to F two points or f/8 and you've got no control over that that will impact the look of your photograph you'll impact how much is in focus and if you're using big lenses wide apertures your depth of field can get very small and you want to be able to control that you don't want say the fun of that the barn owls beak to be in focus but the eye is out of focus and sometimes situations are sufficient that you need to have that control okay so just a couple of examples to show you here's a gorgeous red squirrel I photographed in Scotland a couple of years ago and I was really really keen to get these fantastic autumnal colors in the front of the image totally diffusion out of focus and only with aperture priority could I maintain that control and just concentrate on the squirrels cute little head to keep him nice and sharp and get the background foreground this lovely mushy diffused style so aperture priority was a no-brainer here if I'd been using shutter speed priority it may have I would have lost control of that aperture and strangely I've used this image of this fantastic Kingfisher emerging from the water with the fish because similar thing the depth of field here was very small because I didn't know where he was going to dive so I had to maintain that three or four inches of depth of field and I could only do that by using my aperture and hoping he dived into the water in the right area if I'd been using a narrower a wider aperture I probably would have got very few shots in focus so hopefully those examples were useful so why not shutter priority remember you only really use the shutter speed for two things stopping camera shake and effectively freezing the action or using blur to imply movement creatively there's no real difference between a thousandth of a second or 2,000 per second but can you imagine the difference between as I say F 2.8 and f/8 if the cameras controlling that that makes a big difference so even though it does seem a little bit of logical and understand that keeping photographically keeping controllable aperture is more important and if on the rare occasions you want to use your shutter speed to to have that creative impact it's very very easy it nearly always would be a situation that you've thought about and if you like precomposed so all you need to do is adjust your ISO write down your aperture be whatever you want it to be but dropping your ISO right down till your shutter speed tumbles down to say a sixtieth or a fortieth and you can get that nice creative look and I'm going to show you a couple of images as well here and talk them through using you know your aperture priority but getting that creative effect with a slow shutter speed and bear- slow shutter speeds if you have really bad light slow shutter speeds can be really good so embrace the low light if you aren't a really really bad day in its dull you know be creative and use it and you can do all that while in aperture priority so a couple of images here taken in aperture priority but using a shutter speed as I wanted to get a desired effect these gannets in the Shetland Islands this is taken an or five on a 500 mil lens at a 13th of a second simply by on a again a dark day reducing my ISO down to a level where I can get this effect very easy to do and staying in aperture priority and same here with these mute swans exactly the same effect a 40th of a second with a 500 mil handheld I wasn't worried about it being sharp I just wanted this nice blurred effect and I could stay in aperture priority and very quickly then move on to another subject without worrying about coming out of manual and having to make lots of tweaks and changes I can simply just come stay in aperture priority and push that ISO back up to the level I want now I'm just going to talk about the add-on to use I find with aperture priority that works really well as that go to setting and it's your exposure compensation button if you don't know where it is you need to find it and all that simply does is override your camera by one or two stops of under or over exposure and it is the perfect option for those rare special situations you get so most the time you can walk around with aperture priority with the right ISO setting just walk around you know you'll get a sensible shutter speed using the aperture Pro a pitcher creatively and that'll all be good but what happens when you have a special situation and what is a special situation a special situation is because you're using matrix metering or average metering if you get a very bright subject with a dark background or vice-versa say a blackbird against snow the camera will take that average reading and that's your special situation and what you need to do is simply recognize that here is a special situation you go to your exposure compensation so you've got a barn owl with a white chest and it's sitting in the sunshine and the light is bouncing off its chest and of course the the barn out is the subject not the background or surroundings or whatever so you mustn't over expose for the chest so you say this is a special situation you let the camera do its work and you simply dial in by pressing the exposure compensation button and using the back dial maybe one stop of under exposure and all that does is override the camera and will allow for that variation of the special situation the subject so it could be a white seagull on a dark sandy beach or against a blue sky or a buzzard flying over a cloudy sky so you go dark bird with a black background it's amazing how many people will take a picture and say a bird of prey coming over and of course the bird is completely in in silhouette and they haven't really thought about it so the skill of course is realizing that what is a special situation which just takes practice but it comes very quickly and even look at it and say my camera is taking an average view do I need to dial that in and what you will find is the great thing is you can at the camera get everything you simply point and focus and you look and say special situation click-click up or down for the very rare occasions you and that will nail your exposure there's a lovely came across in mins mirror in Suffolk and is actually a double whammy and a big vote of confidence for aperture-priority this picture which is why I've used it as you can see as the sunrays hit the white feathers obviously I realized it was going to get blown out so I very quickly dialed in about one and a half stops of underexposure while focusing and taking pictures and then I also realized this fantastic branch I wanted to get more of it in focus so when I was an issue f4 it wasn't by very quickly on the aperture ring just changed it down to about f/8 and got the whole branch in focus as well as al angle to see for the overexposure of the feathers so really a really good vote for aperture priority with exposure compensation and here is a much more classic example from my video a few weeks ago about the bar nails where it's a classic case of a bird with white feathers landing this time at sunrise in perfect gorgeous light and as the Sun hit his feathers I immediately realize I mustn't let those overexposed so I simply dialed in one and a half to two stops with under exposure and just kept firing didn't even need to take camera away from my eye so it's it's a really good infield method and default setting to go for especially when you're starting photography the other question that people ask courses for how much exposure compensation do dial-in and the only answer is its trial and trial and error and just practice and the more you do it the easier it gets what I would say from my point of view I very rarely use less than about 0.7 if there's a situation comes up with I regard as a special situation and it very rarely goes beyond about two points of under or over exposure so if you're in doubt you're out in the field something happens and a barn owl lands on a post the great thing to do is maybe get a couple of shots and then immediately darling if the sun's hitting the white feathers dial in you know - one two - two shots under exposure that way you can guarantee the birds and the feathers will be fine and it will throw the background in - into darkness which often is nice anyway and I'm going to show you a couple of examples of where I'm walking around images I took and whether I did use or didn't use any exposure compensation and why I did it so hopefully an image like this bit on where you can see there are vegetal highlights or dark areas you can see why you wouldn't need to dial in any exposure conversation just take the picture of this amazing bit - aggressive display mode but when you come as light like puffins here they've got such a bright white chest you can you can realise before you even start shooting you're going to dial something in and I dialed in one-to-one on the harsh tops of under exposure to make sure the white chest didn't get blown out number two is when we go into manual and I think it scares a lot of people especially in their beginning and there's two reasons I think firstly you need to unhappen understanding of what an aperture and a shutters being do to your image and simile ISO if you're going to use a camera manually if you set a camera to f/8 and a hundredth of a second you need to know what impact that will have on your setting if you're unsure about those that's why I recommend is a start starting point work with aperture priority work with it get used to it understand what you can do creative with your aperture before you come on to manual it's fairly self-explanatory as I say absorbs you're controlling the aperture and the shutter speed and it works best in a in a constant stable scenario where you have a time to measure the exposure of the subject and be actually if you can work out yes this is best for whatever it is I'm photographing for that same subject so it's when you're in a nice control situation and I'll give you some examples and let's say I only really go on to this when you have that good understanding of aperture and shutter speed and the impacts they have on your image so I think it's one for beginners to work towards rather than start with otherwise it can be a bit of a recipe for disaster and you will hear on YouTube a lot of people saying no you must use manual with various criteria but I think for beginners that's a bit too much to ask and what you want to do is get confidence with sharp images that are roughly properly exposed and then you can work off that and that's why I say again start off with aperture priority and then we'll move on to manual animals in snow are the classic examples where the camera can get fooled in their perfect candidate form and exposure this wonderful mountain hare in Scotland popped out of this snow hole little as I first arrived up in the mountains and this is the raw file I took with my Nikon and of course what happened is it underexposed the hair because of all the brightness of the snow so it's a great example of a very quickly winter Manuel took a quick test shot of the hair and I knew that so long as he didn't move around too much I had a nice stable situation where I could just set my exposure for whatever the hair was so I then adjusted rid of me to read a meter reading off him he was for example maybe a thousandth of a second at f/8 and then as you can see here the new image is basically when I've corrected out of slightly cropped it and edited it slightly but you can see now the hair is correct and this snow is blown out which is actually what you want it to be but that's what it actually looks like so animals as snow as they are a perfect candidate for manual exposure and finally that brings us on to our third option which is auto ISO which is a fantastic add-on to most cameras check it's available on your camera it can be used with most most NIC on for instance you can use it in any mode manual aperture priority or shutter priority or even programmed etc and I use it an awful lot with my aperture priority when I'm shooting in changing light particularly at sunrise and sunset where the light is dramatically changing up or down and if you didn't use auto ISO you'd constantly be checking and checking your exposure to make sure do I change my aperture and do you know what do I need to do and auto ISO gives you some safety parameters and think of Auto nice ISO I think a great analogy is think that it's a big safety net that basically protects you from going outside your comfort zone and and basically what you do you set a parameter I'll show you on the back of your camera you but you'll find it in your setup menu and you for instance put in a maximum ISO of 4,000 and you will also put in a minimum shutter speed off for example the 500th and your minimum shutter speed will be based on what you're comfortable with that you can shoot without getting say camera shake etc etc so for argument's sake let's say 500 your camera in aperture priority will balance out the exposure perfectly normally until you hit a point for example when the light is dropping at sunset when you hit a 500th of a shutter speed so using f/4 you were shooting at a thousandth automatically but as the light drops so that shutter speed is automatic been brought down by the camera now you don't want to go below a 500th but because you've set that as your low shutter speed parameter an auto ISO the moment the camera hits that it will then as the light continues to drop it will just increase the ISO right up as high as the maximum you set without going below our 500th so you don't get camera shake it's a really brilliant add-on and as I say a few years ago people didn't weren't that keen on it I think because it took your ISO up to levels that got very noisy but cameras nowadays are so good with with low noise at high ISO settings so it's not a problem and at the end of the day you want a shot to be sharp and noisy not unknown and fuzzy so you always take a sharp shot over a nun shop shot every time try saying that after you've had five pints of Guinness it also same works with manual I find it works brilliant with aperture priority is that little Satan it as I mentioned but if you do evolve on and go into manual mode in manual you can set both your aperture and your shutter speed and I really love this setting and I use it quite a lot I would say it's not one for beginners but what I can do I can set my aperture to be creative I can also have control of my shutter speed so I can have my aperture on the front dolemite my shutter speed is control on the back dial and then what I can do it gives you maximum flexibility to amend my aperture for creativity if I need it for instance if a big bird lands close to me I need to very quickly change that to get more depth of field I won't change my shutter speed maybe necessarily but the ISO will adjust as I change my as I changed my aperture and similarly the shutter speed for example maybe I'm doing a flying bird I need a thousandth of a second it then come and lands on a post I will then change it down to set a 250th bazaine the I auto ISO function in manual it will drop the ISO down and I maximize the shot there the lack of grain in my picture so it does work really well I find it it's very useful so that's manual exposure with auto ISO set and it does give a lot of flexibility it's not quite as quick and what I would say because you you have to think about why you're changing things and it's so it's not of sort of you know run and run gun type of mode and for that I definitely recommend aperture priority but as you evolve and if you are more into wildlife photography to get more experience and you really understand the impact of your aperture and your shutter speed and you want to change them for those very reasons because you've got a creative idea in mind or you realize you can can control your noise in your picture by reducing your shutter speed for example then manual with auto ISO is a really really cool setting and I say I use that quite a lot especially in a venue I know but what I would still say if I'm going somewhere I don't know what to expect go back to aperture priority with your matrix metering have your exposure compensation button ready but let the camera do the work and if you suddenly get a special situation go back and use your compensation dial for that very bright or very dark subject [Music] [Music] so look I've really hope that's been helpful the key thing I'd say is yet fieldcraft definitely learn your field craft that would make the biggest difference practice like crazy if you can even if it's in the garden or on the bird table they're brilliant places to practice your dog running around the garden whatever it may be but I hope they're helpful I'd love to hear your comments and I'll respond to every comment if I possibly can and I love making these YouTube videos I think I enjoy teaching people anyway and the main thing is just being able to be out here in this fantastic location and although it's about to rain but thanks ever so much for watching if you've enjoyed it please subscribe and I say leave some comments or a like it really makes me enthusiastic to do some more and enjoy your photography and so for now from me here in this blue bowwood cheerio and I'll see you again very soon indeed [Music] anyway where to rule I'll take screams let me carry [Music]

Channel: Nigel Morley

Views: 250,280

Keywords: photography, wildlife, conservation, tutorial, camera settings, wildlife photography, focusing, exposure, photography tuition, learn photography, photography tutorial, wildlife photography tutorial, how to photograph wildlife, birds in flight settings, wildlife photography camera settings, nikon wildlife photography, canon wildlife photography, understanding camera focusing, bird photography, nikon d4, nikon d810, birds in flight photography

Id: LP4Q_Q65gfg

Length: 29min 23sec (1763 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2019