Wildlife Photography Presentation - Best Techniques

[Music] hey everyone Steve our backcountry gallery and I have something a little bit different for you this time I had the privilege of being Sunday's keynote speaker at this year's Chicago area photographic school conference and the school has agreed to allow me to share the customized presentation that I created just for them with my subscribers here on YouTube so this video is the complete presentation and it lasts about two and a half hours so it's easily like the longest video I've ever uploaded however it is packed with tons of information tips and tricks all pertaining to wildlife photography in this presentation I put forth what I feel are the most important techniques for a wildlife photographer to master and embrace the tips and techniques I share all at one thing in common when I started using them I personally saw a dramatic improvement in my own wildlife photography finally a couple of quick notes this was a recorded presentation so the lighting isn't the best and it has a far more I guess conversational tone than the more formal measured tone you find in most of my videos in addition due to the long length we had a few splits since we can only record 30 minutes of video at a time with a Z 6 this meant stopping and starting every half an hour for the most part I think it's actually pretty seamless however there is one spot where I do interject a couple of lines here from the desk chair for clarification okay so that's the intro but before we get started I want to mention that I just started a new podcast and the first episode is already on my site with lots more to come I'll put a link to the podcast in the card above and in the description area below okay so grab a warm drink sit back and relax as we join the presentation right after the introduction much thank you everyone for coming out this morning I appreciate it and got a heck of a presentation for you today so as he said in the introduction this is going to be things that I have learned in the field and when I was putting this together is trying to figure out the best way to do this and what I've come up with is to show you the stuff that learned that it seems to have the most real-world application the stuff that really seems to not only help me with my own photography but when I'm coaching people with wildlife photography the stuff that really helps to seem to get them to the next level as well so that's what today's presentations kind of gonna be in a nutshell there so before we get too deep into it though I kind of want to talk about a little bit about myself just so anyone who's not familiar with me kind of get a get a little bit of a background here so this is pretty much what you heard on the intro there I have done a lot of editorial work in the past however more recently I have started doing a lot probably the last five years or so I've really started a shift towards educational stuff I really enjoy it even more than the editorial stuff I mean you know you know I drop photographers to once to use one of my images okay guys you can use that that's fine but for the most part I'm focusing on educational stuff now and it's been a lot of fun we're doing all sorts of workshops and things like that and a lot of the advice I'm going to give you today is based off of what I've seen people struggling with out in the field but of course no introduction would be complete without you know a list of things that I've been published in and all that sighs crammed everything I could on that screen there's a lot more than just that but just to give you an idea that the techniques that you're about to hear about and the advice that I'm about to give you is not just stuff that I think works well but stuff that you know people like outdoor photographer and popular photography you know when they were still around and all these other places and all these other awards and stuff that you can see there this those people think that it works pretty well too so I feel like this is kind of field-tested stuff and stuff that actually is practical and can really work well for you so let's go ahead and give you some contact information here my website is backcountry gallery comm and I'll put the slide up someone would probably have to remind me when we get to the end but because it's after the questions slide my website is backcountry gallery comm I have a YouTube channel too if people can't believe that backcountry gallery youtube.com slash backcountry gallery then there's Facebook at Instagram I'm desperately trying to get more Instagram followers so you know please so there's the contact information so let's go ahead and just dive right into this the first thing though is that the tips and techniques you're about to see one hundred-percent field-tested anymore it seems like a lot of the stuff we see when we're looking on the internet or reading articles or especially watching videos and things like that a lot of the stuff that you see out there is I guess the best way to put it kind of armchair photographer stuff you know it's kind of like an armchair quarterback they a lot of the advice that I see you know people are you know giving this you know technique or that technique and as somebody who shoots this stuff and does this stuff in the field I know it's completely wrong and I think there's a lot of advice out there that's not really field tested that just kind of makes sense to the presenter and they haven't actually you know gone out into the field and said hey does this actually work what are the complications because sometimes you have an idea in your chair at home and then you go out and you try it and you go oh oh well that's not going to work because of X Y Z so everything you're about to see here though is stuff that I do in the field when I'm out and the other thing is that I want you to know that I'm a bottom line kind of guy I am NOT going out just to play with camera gear I have a lot of people that were kind of surprised sometimes to learn that huh gasp YZ is auto exposure modes he uses auto focus I mean I've had people like criticize me because I use auto focus but yeah you know basically I am about going from here to here in the easiest most efficient way I want to get a picture of the animal I see an animal I want to get a picture of it and I want to get it on my sensor and into my memory card in the most efficient way possible I don't really care how I get there as long as I understand what's happening I think it's okay so we're going to talk about you know a lot of those techniques that I use but first I'm going to start off with the zinger the number one key it's a great wildlife photography now a lot of people think that's something like heaven a 600 f/4 right maybe a maybe a d5 or a 1 DX something like that depending if your Nikon or Canon or you know what every brand G's that their flagship camera and some people think it so you know you have to be great at layout post-processing but really it's none of the above I think the best wildlife photographers love their subjects and if you're a wildlife photographer out there who's been doing it for any amount of time I saw heads nodding you know that this is true and there's a bunch of reasons for it but I learned this the hard way I'm going to give you a little background I started doing this believe it or not when I was about 10 or 12 years old I was absolutely in love with the idea going out and taking pictures and stuff and knew nothing about it talk to my parents into letting me get a use some birthday money and they helped out a little bit to an old Pentax Emmy super all right I had a JCPenney 70 to 200 on that thing now you know you laugh yeah but JCPenney I don't know if any of you guys probably some of you may know at the time they had a camera department and they had their own branded lenses and you know optically you know that thing was that they could rival a coke bottle so I mean that was it was that it was bad but you know and I was so bad it didn't matter but I went to library got a whole bunch of books had a stack of books learned everything I could that I was able to comprehend at that 10 to 12 year old you know reading level and did what I could you know we went out and we shot my dad would take me out when we go to the parks and stuff it was great it was a lot of fun and as time went on I decided hey I want to do this I want to be a wildlife photographer and that was not happening at the time and I got older and older late teens I'm Michael I'm gonna try to do this and I was just you know I would say I would send stuff off I think it was maybe my very late teens our very early 20s I finally started getting a few things published here and there but it was not paying anything that would resemble bills at all you know I could go out and you know hey look we're eating dinner because I got a picture sold so at the time I worked at a camera shop and I was under the mistaken impression that because I liked wildlife and just nature photography in general I meit's like all types of photography that's right isn't it no I didn't know that I'm a teenager keep in mind that you know we know everything at that age so I went out and started shooting weddings with people some of the other employees would shoot weddings they'd let me tag along and I had a friend that was shooting weddings and he really gave me a lot of guidance so I was shooting weddings and portraits and you know I was doing this with wildlife photography and it was it was taxing I mean there was times even before that when I was a teenager I should have led with that but even before that when I was teenager I was working at a really crappy dishwashing job and I would leave at 1:00 in the morning from that job and get up at 5:30 to go take pictures because I was insane but you know so that passion continued on as you know as I got older but after about a decade of doing weddings and it wasn't always full-time but you know towards the end I think the last four or five years of it I was doing it as a full-time professional and it got completely burned out sold all my gear didn't want to touch a camera for the rest of my life I wasn't done would still go hiking and it'd still go in the outdoors had all that fun but would never take a camera with me and fortunately we started a different company at the time and we had a conference out in Las Vegas we went to some of the local parks there had a little digital camera at the time it was one of those remember when they first came out there were those little point-and-shoots and this was I think a whole point three megapixels I mean so it was I mean I was dealing with some serious files here so anyway just that hooks really hard again when I took a few pictures in those parks and I was just I was caught I was hooked again pretty soon I'm buying cameras I'm buying gear but the bottom line was that I was it finally occurred to me I finally had that epiphany that the bottom line was that I wasn't doing photography because I like playing with cameras and I like doing settings I like lenses and gear I mean I like that stuff but that wasn't the reason I was doing the reason I was doing photography was because I wanted to take pictures of things that I saw out there and share it with other people that was my that was what was driving me with this stuff I was excited about little lion cubs like this guy here he's you know I love this guy if I could take him home without getting shot this was in Tanzania they wouldn't arrest you they would shoot you yeah I would do that because I just love these animals and that's really what ended up being the you know the driving force so I think the best wildlife photographers really really love their subjects I think this is so important and I mean I hope I'm not going to discourage anyone from doing wildlife photography but in my opinion if you don't really care about these animals I see a lot of people out there doing checklists oh look I got it there's a lion got a giraffe got them monkey got him and that's it they don't care and when you don't care you're not going to get the best photos but when you really do care about this subjects you love those subjects you love going out and shooting them you notice things that other people don't you notice things like those little nuances that little look they give you they that little head tip you want to make sure that you're getting that same connection in your photos and you take action in such a way that you will get those kind of connections that someone who doesn't really care about the subject matter that much is not going to do it so that's definitely something that you need to think about there is I think the best wildlife photographers the stuff that I look out of the line from other people and that I think the people that do the best wildlife photography can tell when they're putting their captions that that they have a passion not for the photography but for the animals so I think that's the number one thing there so anyhow that does it for a bit I'm just kidding so I'm gonna dive into something a little bit more direct directly related to actually taking pictures and that's visual perception because I think the way when our viewers look at a photo makes a huge difference as far as what's attracting their attention in the photo makes a huge difference as to whether or not the photo successful or not so visual perception is very very important so what is it in a photograph that attracts our attention and we're gonna talk about this now I put this at the beginning of the presentation because this is going to kind of come up throughout the rest of the whole morning here so the first thing that tracks your attention is bright areas okay now when you look at this slide what was the first thing you saw was it bright areas because it's a little bit brighter than the rest of it this is gray and this is white your eye likes to go to those brighter areas it's one of the one of the things with our eyes look for if you take a look at this photograph here this owl taken off your eye instantly wants to go to the to the white doesn't it now I mean this is a super extreme example and you know doesn't deliberately like this but you can see kind of how that works your eye likes to go to brighter areas and we can leverage that I'm going to show you tons of examples today where that happens but you could we can leverage that in our photography when we're thinking about how we're doing our compositions and where we're positioning ourselves and things like that and this can work for or against us as you're gonna see later on color attracts our attention especially bright colors and if you notice again using the slide here as an example where did your attention go to the word bright right and here's an example of that bright colors get our attention your eyes go straight to those wings don't they this Roseate Spoonbill with some nesting material over at the stick marsh and your eyes your eyes go straight to that and the nice thing is that we have a lot of good separation there too and we're going to talk about how to get separation like that in a little bit contrast is another thing and that goes hand-in-hand with sharpness contrast and sharpness these two go together because our eye likes things that are sharpen our eye likes things that have contrast and in photography I think those two work together pretty well because what happens when you focus on something your eye tends to go that way and that area also becomes what more contrast to you right so anything that's in focus tends to have more contrast as well so these two kind of go hand in hand and we're in I'm gonna give you a couple examples for that here shortly in fact we'll take a look at this one right now we have some brightness in this area here of course but what's really drawing us in here is all this texture and pattern that we have and that's kind of and that's your sharpest of contrast so those are the those are four things that are really kind of drawing our eye in and that's what our eye is going to look for when you create a photograph that's what's gonna kind of grab the viewers attention and if you leverage that stuff and I am actively thinking about this stuff probably as much or more so than anything else when I'm in the field I'm actively thinking about how can I bring my viewers attention where to where I want it to be in the photograph a lot of people think that wildlife photography is all about the big lenses and the cameras and all that kind of stuff but so much of it is thinking about stuff like this this is what really makes the difference you can give somebody with zero technical skill put it up give them a camera and put it on program but if they have a good eye and they think about stuff like this they're gonna get better pictures than people who have really great technical skill but don't utilize things like this just to be completely thorough some other things that grab our attention size shape orientation now these don't come into play quite as often but I did want to include them on the list here so size is basically the way that works is if you have a group of animals or objects or whatever and one happens to be either noticeably larger smaller than the other your eye tends to go to the one that's the different size next we have shape and that's like for lack of a better example if you have ten squares in a row and then one circles placed in the middle of them someplace your eyes going to instantly go to that circle and orientations the other one and picture like a fence row you have all these posts and maybe one of them is crooked yes where your eye goes one that's one that's like this so here's one example of that your eye tends to go to mom first because she's a different size than the other ones so this was in Tanzania I had that you'd be surprised how hard it is to get those Cubs to line up like that we had to hold them and a couple more here this is a principle that really gets skipped sometimes a lot of people don't realize this one but one of the one of the fundamental things that I try to utilize and leverage when I'm in the field is the fact that warm colors tend to come forward in a photographic cool colors tend to recede that means if I have a warm colored animal say like a lion up against a blue sky or a green background you're going to get a little bit more separation there and I definitely have some examples of that as we as we go through so that's visual perception let's let's take a drink of water and let's jump into one of the most basic principles of all wildlife photography focusing on the eye but we're gonna do a couple of things with this photograph here and the first is as wildlife photographers I think the first lesson we learn is to focus on the eye and don't worry this that this ramps up this is going to be super basic the whole day but one of the first lessons we learned is to focus on the eye but there's a lot of really really critical reasons for that we're gonna talk about those in a moment but I thought this was a good example that you can see how much drama you had by focusing on the eye but I want you to think back to what we just talked about with those visual principles what's happening in this photograph why is your eye going to his eye well first look at the color there that color draws you right in doesn't it one of those principles we talked about was what bright colors right sharpness although I'm not sure how sharp this looks from there on this big screen but you know the sharpens ona focus is right here in your eye tends to go to the sharper areas and because that area is sharper it also has more contrast sarai wants to go there as well so we have all those things going on we have a little bit of brightness here in his feathers from the sky so your everything about this photograph makes you want to look in this area right here doesn't it plus with the green back here mostly green cool colors do what they reseed so you get this nice separation between the subject in the background this was in Viera wetlands by the way I did not fortunately get eaten by an alligator that morning that's totally something you go down to the edge of the water and some of those places in Florida and you're like you know you know here what one eye is looking in the viewfinder and the other ice like okay anyone had any hungry Gators around there's a bunch of these ring-necked ducks floating around there so I thought there's probably not any Gators right okay so I want to talk about this photo I got a whole bunch of stuff to say here first for wildlife one of the reasons we're focusing on the eyes your viewers always going to look for that eye first if for no other reason everything else put aside when somebody sees a photograph of the ebon animal what do you want to do you want to look at the eye right so to that and this this is kind of a combo photo that leads us into another concept so let me go over a few things here when I was this was in Costa Rica and it was after a little bit of macro work that we were doing and what are the days during the workshop and this little hummingbird long-billed herman kept coming to this ginger flower that was just this is wild it's not a it wasn't a setup this was a wild ginger flower and it was driving me personally nuts because I'm helping people with Macker I'm like look at that hummingbird he's just right there there's room when they pies off every time we saw him he was gone so he'd come back every half hour to 45 minutes so he said hey I have an idea after we were done the macros you know everyone's kind of just relaxed and so I'm gonna set up a tripod here a few other participants did as well and we just waited and this is a good lesson here by the way about 45 minutes later I'm like you know what this is not happening and you know the natives were getting a little restless some of the people that weren't shooting it we're like you know I think we're kind of tired ready to go like okay we should probably get going so I reached I stand up I reach down to get the tripod we go flying in like of course right so I drop back down and I fire away and get this shot but there's a couple of key things going on here and if you notice the eye is nice and sharp here and the reason for this is more or less a full-frame shot but I anticipated this shot before it happened I knew what it was going to be and that's very important because what the next concept we're going to talk about is moving our autofocus point to the appropriate area in the composition when I focus on the eye what I do is I always tell my workshop participants anyone who will listen really make your composition first then move the autofocus point to the eye so in this case I didn't even have a bird in there at the time but my autofocus point when I was just looking at the frame without the bird was up here because I knew he was going to come in and I knew I wanted him off to the side of the flower I didn't want it in the center so I made sure my autofocus point was there so when he came in and I went down my autofocus point was already there all I had to do was focus press the back button on the camera and just fire away the composition made itself had I used the center AF point I would have cut off half my flower so you have to think about stuff like that and that's again that's our next thing is the problem is everybody hears this hey I should focus on the eye I know to do that and as soon as they do that this is what they get stuff like this I said while I focused on the eye right and what happened is they used the center AF point to do it and this is why it's so important to move those autofocus points around if you notice you'd have a bunch of them in your camera so many people only use one and I'm hopefully after today you won't do that anymore because this is what I see this with wildlife photography all the time is that people have something it'll be happening fast they won't have time to focus and recompose and they'll just get in there and their fight they'll fire away and we have all the space above just not really doing much and we're cut off down here but it's all because we're using the center autofocus point in the photograph so what I advise doing is to use your autofocus point with your composition you compose first and then move the autofocus point to the eye does that make sense now this is a great example when I was in Costa Rica one morning I was I think it was just being a guide or something we were heading back and right along the road back to our resort there's a sea almond trees right and these rainbow crows scarlet macaws whatever are hanging out there picking away at those sea almonds up there it was pretty cool so we stopped and we're taking pictures in that and this guy here's goofing around and he's the other way right and I'm trying to yeah I'm getting ready and he flips down upside down well fortunately out of focus point was already there I just dropped it a little bit I put it right on his eye and I fired away and what happened here was not only he hanging upside down like that he's doing this he's got like this lateral thing going on because you know the season a tree everything's moving he's back and forth so I just kept that autofocus button pressed the autofocus point on his eye and the camera made up for all of that movement it compensated for all that movement there and can continually kept his ionized and sharp for me if I would have tried to focus and recompose I would had to move my center point to his eye then I'd have to recompose otherwise what would happen if I focused on his eye with a set but wherever it is tail be over here right so we don't want that so because I had that autofocus point on his eye and because I was able to continuously focus I was able to go ahead and fire away and shoot had I done a focus and recompose I could have tried that it could have focused on design then got this composition but what are the chances that I would have had a frame in there that was tack sharp where he happened to have flopped into the zone of focus once or twice much much lower probably probably in my experience zero so and by the way this is one of the things that again why it's important to talk about things that you do out in the field that actually work in a lot of cases people like will look at a shot with that well you can just focus and recompose but they don't get that logistical thing about the bird doing this so again it's the difference between field stuff and armchair photography stuff I guess the other nice thing that I like about wildlife photography is if the eye is sharp generally speaking most people consider the rest of the image sharp enough she's been purchased as gallery prints she's been in calendars I think she may be in a magazine at one point and the only thing that sharp really in there is the area right in her eye area here even though her nose is out of focus even though her eyes are out of focus what brings you into that shot is the fact that her eye is nice and sharp and that's kind of the story that we're trying to tell with a photograph those eyes you're looking straight into her eyes and but there's a nice lesson here one of the mistakes I see people make a lot of times when they're out in the field is that they won't they won't give a situation long enough in this case it was a snowy day I was out with my brand new to me when I was brand new I get right out of the box d3x at the time had my 500 f/4 on because I didn't have my 600 yet and I was at a local park and there's all the snow and it was it was it was great my lens ended up actually having like a quarter inch of stone when it was all done and I found this group of deer and went down and I just kind of hung out with them they're more or less tame but they're not completely tame but as you is got closer and he's myself in sometimes yeah they were kind of circling wide and then they come back after about an hour and a half of this you know I pretty much surrounded by deer and they're like he's just a big dork just ignore him out in a way he's doing out in the snow we didn't have to be and the cool thing with that is that sometimes they get curious when that happens I've had this happen with deer I've had this happen with pronghorn I've had this happened with quite a few different animals and I've really hung out with them after Wow they're like what are you doing why are you here so she comes walking up to me you know it's kind of thing you know like what are you doing I like I don't know what do you do it she was almost at minimum focused 'since I had to like shoot my hand up and she's like what got her but I think the lesson there is it does pay to spend some time with your subjects and let moments like this happen so many times people will run out and they'll be like oh hey I got it I'm on to the next thing but again I think this comes the difference between if you really love these animals or if you're just trying to get photographs of them because there is a difference and I think when you really care about it you don't mind spending an hour and a half of them because it's kind of cool and then you get to you know experience moments like this that you don't otherwise have and finally of course focusing on the eye creates a sense of contact and intimacy I think this little jackal would not have nearly the appeal if his nose were sharp and his eyes were not because again we're looking at those eyes and we need that sense of contact of intimacy so and one other thing here of course is always try to get catch lights and I'm gonna show you why this is creepy a little bit of a difference there right now I did not just black out her eyes I actually cloned the eye material down here and put it up here so this is like that it's like I guess I material there and this is an extreme example but catch lights are so important to a lot of wildlife photographs and I'm always looking for them and a lot of times again this is a matter of just patience so many times I see I hear shutters firing off and I'm out there photographing this stuff and I'm watching and I'm like okay we don't have catch light yeah and you just wait for that little bit of a turn and all of a sudden there's the catch light watch for those when you're photographing the animal sometimes people get so excited when they see an animal even a little deer like this but they it's like you have to stay calm got it got to remain calm and think about what you're doing and what's happening in the viewfinder I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons of wildlife photography is just remain calm when stuffs happening but the other one is if there's something cool happening in your viewfinder keep shooting a lot of times people will stop I've seen people like something really cool happening and they're like burst and like why did you stop they're still doing it you know keep going okay let's talk about the next thing here that is getting to eye level this is one of those things we all know right everyone knows you should get to eye level and I'm going to convince you to do it more often so many of these things with wildlife photography we know about and we hear about and it seems like it would be nice to do but so many times there's a subject like this and you know what I'm down in the muck everyone else is standing up but all those other people standing up they know they should get to eye level but they don't so I'm gonna sell you on it today and what the real benefits are to it this glossy Ibis has a nice story though we were in Florida and Orlando wetlands and they are pretty strict about their sunset deadline they want you out of there by sunset and by out of there they want you on the highway they don't want you coming back to your car they wanted to have that gate closed they want to be home at sunset so they go around with a truck in it you have to kind of watch for the truck and you know once that truck comes and says it's time to go you got to go and yeah and most nights yes I do get kicked out I don't have to I have to be asked but we had seen this glossy Ibis two other nights and this is like night three of this and it was always out there feeding and it has its head down as like and that goes on for I don't know 30 seconds to a minute then it goes that's as much time as you have about two seconds and so the sun's getting low I see the truck I'm down there as far as I can my tripod is in the muck I'm using the z7 and I have the flipped screen up so I'm not like I don't like to be in the muck so I had the flip screen up I use those a lot and I'm trying to get the shot I'm like get your head up get your head up and of course it's yeah the z7 autofocus is not the greatest so it's struggling and only come on I have to get this shot like trucks getting closer so anyhow I finally was lucky enough to get this one just before we got kicked out so she came up locked on and you could see with the drops there I mean just right out of the water and it turned out really cool I really liked the shot but I think that it's as powerful it is because it was shot at eye level and by the way as a side note the background here a lot of people wonder how do you get that like golden reflection on the water right one of the tricks to that a lot of people think that's from just like the Sun hitting the water and I suppose that can cause it to but it seems like it happens a lot more often when you have like trees or something there's trees back here the sudden lights hitting those trees that nice golden light and this is the reflection of the trees in the water so look for something that's reflecting if you're trying to get a golden background you guys say okay where's this I'm gonna be what's it gonna be hitting and where can I be for a reflection so just side note but anyhow back to the eye level thing again I don't think this would have nearly the impact though if you were standing shooting down like this one of the reasons I like to get to eye level is I think it creates a real sense of intimacy and it really kind of put you into it into the animals world in a way that you can't do any other way and to me that's really important I like to I like the viewer when they see the animal to kind of feel like they are part of that animals world and in this case you kind of feel like you're just you know a little you know another lion cover another lion looking over seeing mom and the baby so and I think this is the biggest reason right here is to get that connection if you're trying to shoot field guides and things like that then maybe this doesn't matter but if you're really trying to convey something to your view this becomes critical it also gives your images a very unique perspective and a very unique look because again I'm probably thinking that maybe only 10% of photographers actually actively do this I think 90% of photographers think it's a good idea but I think only about 10% actually implemented but it gives you images a very unique look this is one of the world's most boring birds as a Willett I mean little brown bird along the shore who cares right put in sunrise get down to eye level and this is the kind of stuff you get you have that beautiful reflection on the water there and I really love the Shelf that that wave creates they're coming up you can just peel that you just know that water is just about to hit him now one of the things that I like to do when I'm at the ocean this is in the Gulf of Mexico at Fort de Soto Beach actually and when I have a video on this if you want more information but I like to get right into the surf with these guys as you can see in this photograph I'm not afraid to get wet I put the rank the lens coat rain coat on the camera gear and I'll get that thing nice and low you don't want to let the waves hit it of course but it really can give your Beach shots a very unique look most people shoot beach photos from up here and shooting down right towards the water try shooting from the water going up and and it opens a whole new world but one of my favorite positions though is right along that edge of that surf there I think that's really cool but again when you get down to eye level and do that it looks really unique just now just for a moment picture what this would have looked like if I were standing up would have it enough in shot another thing that people don't realize about getting to eye level is that it compresses the foreground and background of an image we're all looking for subject isolation at least most wildlife photographers like to get that subject isolation so your subject really pops right we're all looking for that and the thing is one of the easiest ways to do that is to get down to eye level when you get to eye level that background kind of piles up and that foreground kind of piles up in front and this was shot with a five six lens but I could almost probably tell you it was a two eight he'd believe me but it was just because I was down low had I been up high the depth of field would have been a lot different and I'm gonna show you an example of that here shortly another thing is that it could make an intimidating subject look even more intimidating when you're at eye level with something that seems dangerous this isn't dangerous this is a baby he's this is just a tree boa I mean I wouldn't want him to bite me but he's not gonna hurt you but when you're at eye level like that it looks it gives it gives you an image a lot more impact especially with an intimidating animal because it's like oh my gosh I'm looking right in the eye of this snake or this bison or this moose or what yeah pick your animal you can kind of express that you know or share that feeling of intimidation that you might be feeling when you're looking at the snake in the field now again I want you to picture what this image would look like if you would have shot it from above right it would have been like just a snake picture of us it wouldn't be anything what it now the big question is why don't more of us get down to eye level if it's so good why don't we do it more often well I think the biggest promise most people don't think it's necessary the shot a lot of times looks pretty good just standing up and this is especially true with the telephoto lenses so we run into these problems where we look through our camera and we're like you know what that looks pretty nice but people in the problem is unless you get down and look at the difference you don't really see it so let me show you this this was taken obviously standing up and it looks okay I mean this is an artwork this is an example look at the difference that's the difference all I the difference between the top shot in the bottom shot was up here versus down here that's it I have had people argue with me that that's not even the same photograph because it's such a dramatic difference they're like that's not that's a different photograph are you used a different f-stop nope everything was exactly the same but if you take a look this is a good example of what happens here and to prove it look at this stump here and look at this stump here same one same shot but think about what we just talked about you have a lot more sense of contact and intimacy with the bird you feel like you're another bird kind of in there looking at your buddy over there right look at the difference look what happened to the background look what happened to the perceive depth of field depth of field is the same I was in the same spot but the reason this one seems to have deeper depth of field here is because the sensor was tilted down because I was shooting downward with this one here the sensors straight like this so we get this shallower looking depth of field the fact we don't have much in the way the foreground here but the background piles up more behind it there's more information back there so you get this much better separation from it this is the difference but this is also the trap like I say a lot of times I think the main reason people don't do this more often and try to get to eye level more often is because they see stuff like the top shot and they're like that looks ok you know that looks fine I don't really need to get to eye level for this shot but you'd be surprised how often you can see a dramatic difference like that so what are we get - I level well I have a bunch of tips for it here and some of them don't in chrome don't involve being on your belly so how about that first drop your height and try that flip screen does anyone have a flip screen on the back of their camera probably everybody right almost use the flip screen I use that all the time this was taken with addy 850 a 300 PF and a whatever it was teleconverter 1.4 teleconverter and I was at Fort know Fort Myers Beach this is there's a little Lagoon there and this little clover was just kind of making his way along there and I put the camera these guys I don't know if you're familiar with them they're about like what like this big they're really tiny and to get to eye level with something like this it's on the ground you have to go to extreme so no tripod just on the wet sand it was hard wet sand so I wasn't like really ruining the camera no one wants to buy a used camera from me right but I have it in the in the wet sand they're the hard wet sand and I just have it the flip screwed up I'm on my knees I'm not I'm not on my belly and I'm just kind of doing this doing the best to focus live view focuses a little dodgy but was able to pull it off and I have actually getting quite a few I like this one the best because I like it the position of his foot there but you know you don't have to get on your stomach to do this and in a lot of cases you can even especially if you get good at live you can even maybe put it like here and stand up the cameras at eye level and you get to stand and be comfortable so think about that flip screen the other option is to use the terrain I'm in the Serengeti this little lion cub and his friends are all playing in a little area here right now when you're in a situation like that you can't really get out of the car because I don't know if you guys have ever watched lions in the wild but those mothers are really protective I don't think I've ever witnessed an animal that's more protective of its young than a mother lion I've seen bears leave their cubs behind like here on your own I'm scared but I've never I mean you don't want to mess with another lion so obviously in a vehicle here but yet look at this eye level shot how did I do it terrain you talk to your driver you say hey driver this isn't that good I don't want to you don't let them park next to the animal and then yeah in this case we're copies and there's like you know a little bit of terrain there so we just kind of maneuvered the vehicle so that we're at eye level with where the Cubs were playing and we're getting higher level shot son oh yeah that's all I have to do you do it on foot to use the terrain I was in Yellowstone for this one and we were out there found this beautiful elk and at first when we walked up I was like at eye level or maybe a little hair but higher and I noticed if I just went downhill I could get this more dramatic look so I did I didn't have to I was standing up when I shot this but it looks like I'm looking up again use the terrain when you can another tip is to stay back and use longer glass this is one of my secret weapons I use this all the time note the difference in the angle there when you have something close on something far away the the angle gets steeper the closer you are to the subject right so if you use longer glass it reduces that angle and it gives it more of an appearance of being shot at eye level so using longer glass even if you don't necessarily need to maybe back up and you know put your longer lens on so that's a that that's that that's when I use all the time of course there are times to break the rules this guy was up here in the bamboo and I was shooting like this you know it's fine sometimes you have to break the rules sometimes there's reasons to but just make sure that you understand why you're breaking it yeah in this case I think it's cute that he's looking down like that so I want to show that in the photograph so you know everything I'm telling you here you know there's always exceptions there's always exceptions and there's always time something's going to work better and as a general rule there's something to think about when you're at eye level the subject feels like it's kind of on the same you know level as you are right if you're shooting upward it tends to give the subject a little more dominance if you're shooting downward you tend to be dominating the subject and you have to think about that you can use that when you're out there shooting you can take advantage of that in this case you know I don't know that he looks like he's really dominating but it still ended up being a cute shot sometimes when you have a small animal that's up in a tree that can work but obviously don't take that to extremes because I'm gonna say that and people are like well I wanted the chickadee to look like it was dominating well you got a belly shot they don't you know you don't shoot straight up either so you have to you know all of this stuff has to be thought about measured here's another one mostly I like to shoot at eye level or a little below eye level in this case though it didn't work I tried it with this little golden-mantled ground squirrel out in Bryce Canyon he was I think begging for food there might be people feeding him I was I was not one of them probably only because I didn't have anything to give him because he was really cute but I would I did not beat him but he was over there and he was you know he's begging like this and I thought you know the eye level shot just wasn't doing it and he was hanging around something like I'm gonna try one from up here I really like the one looking down on him because it looks like he's like it looks really cute so again though I did it deliberately and I did it with the idea that I wanted to kind of show him being a little smaller and looking a little more you know helpless and stuff in the frame and you know being dominated by you know the viewer so oh my gosh anyone who's been to my workshops they hear this all the time watch your foreground and background honestly if there's one thing that I can point to that really made a difference in my own wildlife photography is when I started thinking about backgrounds as being as important as the subject anyone who's ever shot with me can verify this when I see a subject the first thing I do is I lock onto the subject and I'm looking and I position myself for a background that's all I'm thinking about after I spot the subject I'm trying to find a good background and this seems super simple and again it seems like something we all probably kind of sort of know but based on my actual experience in the field working with people it's it's something that that nobody takes seriously enough and I like this shot as an example giraffe on the Serengeti there this was taken during one of those times you guys everyone's seen it it's so cool when you have those dark clouds but the Sun lights like behind you and it's illuminating the foreground it was more of a hazy sunlight but still you get this dramatic difference in light and you get this really dark sky behind it and in this case it worked out really really well I loved the everything about it we were driving along we saw these giraffes we saw the sky ever I'm like we've got to get over there we got over there as quick as we could shot the photo five minutes later I'm not even sure if it was a whole five minutes it was pouring down rain we were desperately trying to get the canvas on the side of the vehicles we were using rolled down and protect ourselves but I tell people think about this image with just a white hazy sky nothing right it goes away not any good at all so it's the your background and your foreground are so important in the images and I say if you take one thing away today and it's you're always getting good backgrounds you're it's gonna not it's gonna ratchet you up at level I guarantee it the background should complement and not compete with your subject and you know that's what we have going on here the entire setting is complimentary your eye wants to go to the Grizzly even though it looks a little oversaturated in the projector there your eye wants to go to the Grizzly it doesn't want to wander around the rest of the frame too much and that's what we want we want a background that's complementary a background that's working with our subject and not taking our eye and our attention away the Department of the Interior one of the one of them I uses this on their Instagram feed every now and then and it always Garner's like 15,000 likes or something I think the reason the photo is popular is because the foreground on the background and all of that works so well with a grizzly and that's what and that's what you're looking for now on the other hand you get a backgrounds that distract this is a spectacled owl but where does your I want to keep going right up here right in here and here it keeps bouncing around you come back and even if you're staring at his face this is catching the corner your eye doesn't it at least it does for me if I was actually gonna use this shot I would have to spend a whole bunch of time fixing it and I don't know if I wanted to do that I cut too many images to process to fix stuff like that and the thing is we weren't into this a lot in Costa Rica but yeah it happens everywhere of course and the thing is so often it's very very easy to fix a shot like this in the field just by taking a few steps and I have an example of that this is a barred owl looks like I set him up there doesn't he this is wild we were in Circle B Bar reserve in Florida and there was a group of photographers and myself we were all just and there wasn't like a workshop where you just happened I'll see the owl and he was originally in a pretty bad spot it wasn't very good at all so we're sitting there and we're like okay you know talking in that and then he flies over and lands on this perch and I'm like oh that's nice except in my mind first thing I look at his backgrounds and it was a terrible background so I go okay cuz backer behind him I mean it was there's a you know some vines and it yeah it's just a lot of white sky and splotchy stuff like just kind of similar to what you saw a minute ago except worse and I'm like oh that's really bad and he's actually a little bit backlit at that point too so it's like oh man this is good go bout that far and this is the background that's all I had to do so many times we can change our backgrounds by just taking a few steps this is some this is a lesson I try to drum into the participants that we have in our workshops in Costa Rica is that just that little bit of movement made such a big difference in this photograph and again one of the reasons I think that most people don't pay attention the background is guess how many of that 12 or 15 people that were together there all of us how many people moved over me everyone else was firing away like crazy over there once he looked my way I had this so gotta watch him now what are some sources of those distracting white spots in the background obviously white sky is your first one but reflective leaves and vegetation can also get involved with that and that can be a very big distraction as well you'd be surprised how much reflection you can get off of leaves and vegetation especially in the tropics in warmer areas they get kind of waxy bright tree trunks and branches nothing ruins a nice shot like a big white branch behind it does it water you know reflecting in the background can sometimes do it now one thing though people get caught up on this one here a little bit they say oh Steve doesn't like white skies at all not true not true sometimes a white sky can work with your subject depending on what you're doing and what your goals are with that subject in this case I think that it works really well it helps with the graphical nature of this image so sometimes yeah I'm gonna go ahead and yeah it doesn't really bother me that much but think about this photo if there were like some branches back here and some leaves it would it would just fall apart it just wouldn't work so we can also use the background to help add to the story sometimes we just want to blow backgrounds out right but other times we can add it to the story this is a sandhill crane Bosque del Apache and I was photographed with these guys and I think f4 maybe with my 600 and I didn't like the background the background was okay but it was more I wanted to show a little bit more of what was going on behind bird so I dropped to f/11 and that obviously isn't gonna bring the background into focus with a 600 millimeter or 500 or whatever this was but it's gonna make those mountains a little bit more defined so you can see a little bit about what's going on behind I mean where he lives and things like that as long as it's not distracting I like to kind of try to include a little bit of information same with that giraffe that we saw at the beginning of this section of the presentation this is another one I like this is a little little baby more hen chick they call it potato chips down there unfortunately because that's how that what the great blue herons think they are but I know it's a sad thing let me depress you first thing in the morning sometimes it's neat to tell a story with the background like in this case we have the the parent one of the parents is you know right behind him there's he's looking now I also like the drop on that one too but we have a little the parent handing it out behind in there and it kind of you know tells you a little bit more about what's going on there but don't forget your foreground either this was in the Smokies I do a lot of barn owls for some reason but we were in the Smokies we found this owl he was hunting crayfish they do that believe it or not and it was really cool he was in these trees and I start walking up to him and I see this shot my original intention was kind of to get in front of him and try to get a photograph that direction but I like this so much I stopped and took the photograph from here just because I love the way that the foreground kind of wraps around him there and he just had his head kind of popping out there you know looking intently so don't forget to take advantage of the foreground when you can when it's not when it's not a distracting element but watch for blurred out objects between your subject and yourself because what happens sometimes is we're out there and I see this all the time it happens to me all the time we shoot in Costa Rica we shoot in trees a lot right so there's always stuff between ourselves and the tree and what happens is you'll get a little vine or a little branch and it completely will blur out if you look at the inset I know this is probably not the best resolution here but if you look at the inside here that kind of looks okay there doesn't you don't see this but when you get back home on your computer that kind of thing is see and what happened there's a little branch or twig or something between myself and the animal one trick for that to avoid that is again you have to keep your got to keep your head when you're out there but just take a look over the lens before you shoot and see if there's anything between yourself in the subject and sometimes we just want to blow that background away this was a raven that we found at a picnic area and he was particularly friendly which was nice he was really a neat guy and the background was some grass and some sand that was on a hill back there and it just made a real nice cream-colored background right behind him there and I just completely blew it out yeah I shot the lens wide open with this so let's talk about separation everybody wants to know how do you how do you how do you achieve that separation some people call a 3d look I hesitate to call it that because we are dealing with two dimensions here how do you achieve separation to really make your subject kind of pop pop of that background well there's a bunch of ways to do it first way is through focus and things like that and we can see that a little bit here in this photo we're going to go over these one by one of course but even though the background is a similar color to him we have this rim light here that's kind of separating him a little bit obviously the focus is here and not in the background so he's really standing out there and one of the things I was thinking about with this photo just imagine what would have happened if I would have shot that at f11 and that background would have been much busier there would have been no separation whatsoever would there it would have been just yeah that's a bird parakeet so yeah fish eagle here first tip for separation is try to use shallow depth of field as much as you can so obviously we have a nice separation between the subject in the background with this it was shot wide open with I think a 600 millimeters there 600 natella convert or something like that so but again yeah shot wide open very shallow depth of field makes it a little bit easier now one of the things I like to tell people about our show people is one of the arguments that you hear sometimes against like fast glass is I don't why do I need an f4 lens because current ISOs in these new cameras are so good right what do you need an f4 lens for this is why f4 allows you to isolate that subject to a whole heck of a lot better than something like say f6 point three if you notice he seems to stand out better from the background then he does doesn't he this information back here starts to get distracting and it's an okay I mean either on my art but it's an OK photo but this one is definitely showing you a little bit more separation at f4 and this doesn't mean you have to run out and buy an f4 lens but it does mean that when given the choice if you're trying to do something where you're isolating the subject from the background you got open that lens up a little bit and it can make a dramatic difference but if you are thinking about an f4 lens they can't decide why this is what you tell your spouse but here's another example I think the separation on this one is really nice too and a little kiss kitty in a fence he's just kind of sitting on a barbed wire there and you really yeah I mean there's no doubt what the subject is nothing else in there is interfering but again super shallow depth-of-field now the other way we deal with depth of field is it's - it's a two parter the first part of it is to watch background the subject proximity the closer your subject is to the background of course the sharper that background is going to be so if I'm in a situation where I have an animal that is maybe available on multiple backgrounds maybe if I move a little bit so maybe I have an animal and it's like this little bird here this little roller and I can maneuver myself in such a way that the backgrounds will bit further back I will take that every single time if I if the other grass and stuff was right behind him it would have been much more distracting shot this is much cleaner that way however it's not just background a subject proximity we have to think about we have to think about photographer to subject distance as well okay because these two work hand in hand and I think the best way to illustrate it is with a story so this coyote was out in Yellowstone and I'm he's apparently a beggar because he is like yeah I mean zero fear none whatsoever most coyotes out there do not really want to hang out with you but this guy was like hey how's it going to have some food you know I didn't but you know he's still tolerated me pretty well so we pull over we see him like along the side of the road and original thought I had we were testing the 500 PF at the time original thought was hey I'm gonna get a shot of him the the sage is behind him I'm gonna stop and get a picture of that and I was taking full body shot right so I get out but I noticed that his distance to the background versus my distance to him would mean that that background is gonna be way way sharper at five six and I really wanted it to be so instead of doing the whole body shot I thought what about a head shot maybe he'll let me do that so instead I started working my way towards him and I got it nice and tight so I cut my distance down this way I got in closer and of course depth of field gets a little bit shallower and my background becomes a nice blur instead of what would have been with a full body shot just a coyote standing in front of some sagebrush so when you're in the field I guess the bottom line with that is to kind of think about things like that sometimes can you alter your shot or can you choose a different photograph that maybe does the same thing or does something better than what you really were intending it when you first saw the animal is there something you can do there to change your mind and to get a better shot and that's how and that's what I did with this one right here dilute use a longer focal length even if you don't need it we talked about this with kind of making things look like they were eye level but it applies to trying to get a little more separation as well so maybe you're out in Africa or wherever you happen to be but maybe in this case we were in Africa I made sure that the guides knew that we were shooting long glass and I did not want to be close the problem is sometimes they'll drive right up next to him say hey there's your lion it's like no that's useless I don't want to pet him I want to take a photo of it so generally speaking I mean on this trip we were in Tanzania and it's funny because this is going to run counter to what you usually hear about Africa most of the time I was either at 600 or 800 50-millimeter most of the time when people say what do you need for Africa Oh 100 to 400 that's all you need you can get real close using longer glass gives you that more eye level shot looking thing that we talked about before but in addition you can get some better subject isolation so you can stay back further now I know that if you're really really technical you know that technically speaking changing focal length doesn't really change depth of field and and if you didn't know that there you go if you have if I were to shoot this exact same framing with a hundred millimeter lens and then I did it with my 600 millimeter lens the actual depth of field the actual zone of focus what was acceptable sharp is actually the same I didn't believe it either I tested it it's in my exposure metering book you can see it for yourself it does it that's how it works however what does happen and why they're longer focal length does do this just as a little side note in background is because the blur your areas in the that you have in your background the areas that are out of focus are larger because of the magnification of the lens so you do indeed get better separation so so anyone who's really technical that's why it works now this is going to make people mad and I'm sorry but use a full frame and avoid cropping oh I thought there was gonna be tomatoes that this isn't to say that you can't get great shots with cropped cameras I'm just giving you tools that you can use in the field that's all I'm doing and the reason I use full-frame cameras as much as possible actually I'm pretty much exclusively at this point is because they allow me when the subject allows me I can get in closer and when I can get in closer order we talked about with the coyote I can get better subject isolation if I want it and I don't always want it sometimes I will stop down and you know to not have it but full-frame allows you to get in a little bit closer and that's giving you shallower depth the field and it's giving a better separation now cropping is another one that that's always a touchy subject cause people are like I have to crop it's too far away I understand I know but when you use a full-frame camera you crop it you're throwing out one of the biggest benefits to use in that full-frame camera and that is that you can get better subject isolation the further you are from your subject the more you're going to have in focus not just with on the subject itself but behind the subject and it's gonna make the things the background and stuff everything's going to look busier and you're not gonna have that nice sense of isolation and you're not gonna have that pop or anything like that so one of the reasons people ask me why you know why am I so against cropping and why am I always shooting full-frame this is one of the reasons why do I shoot f/4 glass this is one of the reasons I like to have all these tools in my toolbox now again it depends on what your goals are of course you know for me I am all about I love these shots that have very good separation with clean smooth backgrounds I'm a sucker for those things and if you are - this is yeah here's some tips but if you avoid cropping and trying to stick with full-frame cameras and avoid cropping those full-frame cameras then you're gonna be able to you have another tool in your toolbox or to use another way we can do it though to help kind of get a little bit of a pop off the background is what we talked about before warming cool colors we have a nice warm bird and what a warm colors do right come forward right greens or cooler colors what are they do they recede in the frame so I'm getting a little bit better subject isolation here than I would have if there were brown trees in the background for instance so that's another tip that you can use and I I try to utilize this whenever I can most of the time simply by kind of looking at what's going on in the background and what I have with my subject if I have a warmer colored subject you can bet that I'm looking for the nice bright green background I'm looking around for a nice cool green looking background you can also of course use dark and light backgrounds to achieve separation this baboon was out in the Sun and he I maneuvered myself on the boat so that I had a nice big dark shadowy area behind him so that provides you know obviously he's he's a separated from a background as you could possibly be this is not a snake it's a monitor lizard and again he had some dappled light there but the background was nice and dark so he stands out at least the bright areas stand out I'm kind of utilizing the fact that your eye likes to look at bright stuff in this photograph and of course we can use light backgrounds too I actually have a couple of things going on here - obviously sharpness she's you know nice and sharp so that's catching your eye that's giving her some separation from that softer background we have a you know bright background and we're achieving some separation with that there we also have warm tones and cool tones the snow is a little bit as a slight bluish cast behind her so that helps another trick is to put the subject against something that's just slightly darker you don't have to have the extremes that I was showing you if you have something that's out in sunlight and it's a little bit darker behind it you can still achieve some separation that way - but these are all the things that you need to look for when you're out there photographing stuff trying to get wildlife shots here you thought it was just going out and seen an animal taking a picture right no all right the next trick is to go for great light we were on the Chobe River and the sudden was just working on setting there and these elephants and swam across the river I have a whole story on my website if you want to read I think it's probably the first thing up there right now still and that was it was absolutely phenomenal I couldn't believe this is the best light we'd had on the entire trip for sunlight most evenings yeah sometimes the Sun such as kind of Peters out and it's like okay that was blue sky now it's a bright sky now it's no sky but this was one night that we actually had some real pretty color and we had the guy maneuver the boat into position so that we had the you know the silhouette thing going on there but great light makes such a big difference let's talk about some of that first take advantage of that gold now everyone knows the Golden Hour is right take advantage of that whenever you can that means unfortunately in the morning no sleeping in you got to get there but the golden hour isn't the best is it that is 15 minutes after sunrise and before sunset that's your real special light right there I will get out earlier than sunrise in a lot of cases just because I want to see if I can find an animal before this kind of light happens right because if we get out there at sunrise what happens inevitably what happens we walk around and after this nice really cool light goes away then we find our animal so a lot of times good piece of advice is to get out there early and same in the evening you know it's not quite as hard in the evening cos you know you're awake and all that stuff you have to force yourself out of bed early but you know in the evening if I find something good a lot of times I'm gonna try to stick with it if I can until I can get into this last 15 minutes or so light of course my other favorite is overcast love overcast because I get to shoot all day and because it gives your image there's a really nice soft look and some people think you can't get catch lights during overcast guess what you can or shadow it works as well sometimes you end up in a shadowy area that kind of a good substitute for overcast so let's talk about backlight and side light especially when the Sun is low a lot of times I'll advise people one of my favorite things to do is shooting backlight inside light but people like every time I try that it turns out terrible you got to do it when the sun's low you can't have real harsh light if you do this at 10:30 in the morning on a sunny day you're gonna be disappointed for sure you have to do when the sun's low this snowy egret was just a little bit after sunrise there's a little bit of haze and you can see we've got some nice rim light here right along our back there just a kiss of it and it makes such a big difference I like front lit shots are okay in a lot of cases but nothing gets my juices coming like a good side light or backlight shot and a lot of times you kind of a combination of those and the biggest trick is just to make sure you're doing it in light that's actually manageable to do it in so definitely be looking for this within that first 15 20 minutes of sunrise in that last 15 to 20 minutes before sunset that's when it's really gonna be at its best here's another Sun here's a side light shot this was on the hotter side of sunrise here but it still worked out one of my favorite shots of an out there it really I loved that the look he gave I'm glad the other elk over there was yelling at him because that's what made him look but you can see the side light coming in there it's so much more dramatic just picture that shot it'd be okay if I was like where he's looking for a front light shot but it wouldn't be quite as good the side light really makes it and again metering is not nearly as tricky as you think it is as long as the lights not too harsh and then second tip there is just to avoid clipping those highlights sometimes you have to take a test shot or two real quick before the actual pose that you want to capture happens just take a test shot use Blinky's just take a quick look on the back of the camera and see if they're not too bad you're good I don't mind a little bit of clipping in some side light shots especially light backlight and rim light if that has a little tiny but it's not the end of the world but you just can't kind of keep an eye out for that plus most modern camera especially Sony an icon in particular Canon even to a lesser extent have a little bit of ISO invariance so you could actually under expose a little bit and then bring it back and post but you have to be careful about it another example this was in the Serengeti early in the morning foggy believe it or not you don't expect the Serengeti to be foggy here now but sometimes it is and we had to give in a position for for this because the driver gets where he wanted to put us over here and I'm sure they would have looked I mean they're you know they were obviously looking at us but I said no no let's try it here and I really like this shot a lot more the fog is picking up the sunlight a lot more here if the fogs to your back you don't get this golden haze look to it like that you have with this so again trying to argue side lighting backlight here for you I'm gonna give you a few tips for handling bad light next when we're dealing with some of our subjects here some fins are stuck in bad light our way and how do we how do we deal with that well I'm gonna give you a three different tips here that will help you first is to work with subjects that are in shade and maneuver so that you have a shady background - this was taken on a sunny day in Costa Rica it doesn't look like it but he was in the shade the birds down there are smart and in most tropical areas and even you know if it's yeah summertime here birds generally don't want to sit out in the Sun and bake any more than we do so they tend to land in shady areas so part one is easy part two is a little bit trickier but in a lot of cases you can maneuver it yourself remember we talking about backgrounds all it takes us a few steps all I had to do is maneuver around a little bit so that I had a nice solid green background that was shady and not in the sunlight now I think there's probably Sun between myself in that background hitting the ground can't see it in the photo though all you see is a bird and a shady background so even though this was taken in that in bad light I was able to make it work so sometimes you have to kind of get creative with that speaking of which try alternative methods when you're stuck with bad light this was a very recent one in Botswana there's a kind of a sandy area that was in sunlight behind him I just meet Hurd for him and I let that just blow the heck out when I got back to Lightroom there was a couple of spots here that we're still showing through I just went with the adjustment brush turned up the exposure and just made it all white solve the problem three o'clock in the afternoon in Africa is normally terrible but I really like this shot and it was in bad light another one is to consider a black and white version of the shot sometimes black and white works a little better in bad light I think that color does and I really really love this this is one of my favorite lion portraits and when we shot it it was maybe 10:30 in the morning light was directly behind him high and behind him and the color was terrible it just I couldn't make anything look right there with the color it's just you know it was just in a shadow and there was nothing to it so I was like let me try this black and white he's the black and white punch preset in Lightroom and then made some of my own adjustments to it really love the way it turned out again terrible light so there are there that there are all there are alternatives out there okay let's talk we're gonna start the metering section a little bit more technical stuff here and then we're gonna take a break and we'll finish the metering section after that so I have a whole book on exposure and metering that's about six seven hundred pages so for more information see that book because this is going to be the abbreviated version so anyhow let's talk about metering I want to talk about the the metering mode I use and the exposure mode I use so let's talk about the metering mode first so which metering pattern did I use most of the time most people are surprised to learn that it is matrix same as evaluative and like Canon or Sony okay but I use matrix most of the time and I use it because it works a lot of times people be like I can't believe you don't use center-weighted or spot and then I refer them to one of those first slides where I said I'm a bottom line kind of guy I do what works because I'm very careful with my backgrounds and things like that and I'm not gonna have white splotchy skies that confuse matrix meters most of the time I can use this with a little exposure compensation and I'm golden no problem at all so let me give you an example here why I like it this photograph here was taken in bare wetlands Florida one of these guys I can't remember which was coming in to stump that they have out there in the wetlands old tree he was in the shade he's coming in I'm like group AF up to as he's coming in this guy says hey it's my perch so he comes in and they come together and woosh up in the sky really cool thank good as I was in matrix meter and had auto-exposure governor I would not have got in the shadow I don't think let's talk about that so because I was using matrix metering the camera was a the switch very rapidly I was meet matrix meeting with auto-exposure it was able to say hey you know what you're you were in the shade now you're in the sunlight I know what to do about that but more importantly matrix metering is looking at this entire scene and it's giving some bias to the center point we're gonna talk about that in a minute but spot metering on in this case this I like to pick out spot maybe because I see people using it wrong all the time spot metering in this case would have maybe not worked out as well depends where it landed obviously when you have birds flying and you're shooting you know they're not going to be exactly where you want them in the frame every single moment had my spot meter landed here would have been okay but what would have happened if it would have landed here up here would have grossly and I mean grossly overexposed the image the biggest fallacy was spot metering the biggest misconception is that you take your spot meter and you stick it on your subject and it meters for your subject that's almost correct you stick it on your subject and it meters from middle tone is a better way to put that because when it meters from middle tone it's gonna try to make everything that it sees middle tone middle tone gray how do you make this middle tone gray we're using just light what you have to do the exposure right you got to bring it way up so what a grossly overexposed the image so one of the things I've seen people do who try to use spot metering like in my workshops and stuff is that they'll go out and they will turn it on and they think that I'm wrong that that's not how it works and they know what they're doing and they'll come back after a day or two although they're like Steve my exposures are all over the place you know some are too bright summer too dark what's going on I'm like oh you in spot metering it's my first question it's almost every single time the answer is yeah that's why now not to say that you can't use it I use it every now and then myself but you have to understand what it does it's gonna make whatever it's under middle tone so if you happen to have something that's middle Tony what do you spot metering you're golden go for it I like to use spot metering though in conjunction with full manual mode and not auto exposure so that I'm in charge of everything I don't usually use it without any kind of auto exposure mode and most of the time I like auto exposure so we end up in a situation where I'm using matrix but let me give you some hints and for matrix metering here the nice thing about matrix metering and evaluative metering is that it can overcome that middle to UM bias I was just talking about to an extent but only if there's going to be multiple tonality 'z so if you use something like matrix metering and you give it a snow scene and there's nothing else in there but snow if you've ever shot that you know what happens right under exposes the heck out of it it's not still not smart enough not to know that however if you have multiple tonality 's in that scene like that deer photo that either of those two deer photos that you saw had no compensation in there at all because there were multiple tone Alaniz you have the deer and you had the background in that and if you have a mix of tonality as matrix metering gets a whole heck of a lot smarter matrix own evaluative when I say matrix from here on out just think that you know if you're using Sony or Canon that you know the the multi segmented metering basically the way these work is they evaluate the entire scene and compare it to like a big internal database of different photo scenarios and then they try to determine what you're photographing through that and what I like about if your raw shooter most of the time certainly not all the time but most of the time it gets to the point where it's close enough it doesn't have to be necessarily perfect if you're shooting wrong you can go in and adjust that exposure slider a little bit in Lightroom one way or the other it's exactly the same as if you were to change the ice on your camera a little bit one or the other not a big deal at all so it gives you that flexibility because I say most of the time it's close enough it doesn't have to be perfect but it's close enough whereas with spot metering or center-weighted sometimes if you don't kind of intercept its mistakes it can actually cause a bigger problem now this is for nikon but i think that probably every other manufacturer should probably do it the same way i can't imagine not having it like this but with the night kind of equipment it actually will give more weight to what's under the autofocus area a lot of people don't realize that when you're using matrix metering it's what its gonna do like if you're in single point autofocus it's actually pretty cool because what it does is it takes a look under that single point AF and it says let me see what's under here what tonality is under here because i to give that a lot of weight in the exposure because if he's only using one autofocus point then what's under that autofocus point must be pretty darn important and I say I'm guessing that Canon and Sony probably do something similar because it's a pretty good it's you know it makes a lot of sense has use larger and larger AF areas though the bias goes down so it doesn't buy as quite as much in for that autofocus point so this is one of the reasons I'm always telling people the smaller the AF area the more way to gets in the decision but to use the smallest autofocus point you possibly can so I think that's about all I have for now let's take about a 10-15 well we can go 15 minute break so this half or this part of the presentations going to get a little bit more technical so we did the artistic thing let's talk about some more exposure stuff the first one is my favorite exposure mode which is manual plus auto ISO this is an auto exposure mode I know that you put your camera into manual mode and this blows people's minds but it is actually an auto exposure mode pretty much any art any time I'm using auto exposure this is the only thing I use I use this and then I use full 100% manual that's it and I use this probably 80 to 90 percent of the time full hundred percent manual mode is probably 10 to 20 percent of the time it just depends again bottom line kind of guy I do whatever is going to get me the photo in the most efficient way in some cases that's just switch it to manual mode cause the cameras making too many mistakes because of varying tonality 'z usually but most of the time I'm using manual auto ISO I have matrix metering on and I'm using exposure compensation as needed let me talk about what this is for those that don't use it that of curious is anybody using this right now oh good we're going to convince the rest of them okay so what is it we place a camera in manual mode we turn on auto ISO pretty straightforward the cool thing here though is that you set the shutter speed and f-stop in the camera floats the ISO okay so that puts you in control of the two most important factors in your exposure equation right because ISO is usually negotiable but a lot of times we have a specific shutter speed and a specific f-stop we want one we're doing wildlife now this again this advice is more or less for wildlife if I'm doing landscapes there's a chance I'll use aperture priority because my well priorities are a little bit different but for wildlife this is definitely super super helpful because it allows you to take control of the two things you really need to be thinking about now a lot of times people don't really understand how this is an auto exposure mode since you're actually literally are turning your camera to manual and the best way to do is think of it like a think about how aperture priority works right how does that work we set an ISO we said enough stop what does the camera do shutter speed right this you set a shutter speed you set the f-stop and the camera does what it sets the ISO so again the camera is doing something for you to kind of complete the equation for the exposure but in this case it offers us a whole heck of a lot more flexibility this does work with exposure compensation on most cameras it definitely does with Nikon definitely does with Sony and newer canons I think also can use exposure compensation to older canons for some reason they would let you shoot in this mode but there was no exposure compensation so for wildlife photographers that was kind of a non-starter we don't want an auto exposure mode that we can't use with exposure compensation so but for most modern cameras especially Canon are especially Nikon and Sony you're good to go and I say most minor canons I think it works too the main reason I use this there's actually two of them but it's the speed that allows me to do things it allows incredibly fast changes of f-stop and shutter speed way quicker than we can do any other way and I have a couple of examples I'm going to show you how this works the first one remember that fish eagle from earlier that had shot well I grabbed my yep and I was doing body shots of him and he starts leaning into the wind I saw a little exhaust shoot out the rear end I knew he was getting ready to fly and just as that happen he starts leaning and just takes off on me just like that I was a like I don't know five hundredths of a second when I shot that other shot or when I was shooting the body shots rather as soon as I saw that he was about to do it you know what I did I had my camera up to my I never took it away I just rolled my finger and I was instantly at like 3200 or 4000 it happened so quick all I actually didn't pay attention the shutter speed I just rolled it and got as much as I could because he was flying and I had to catch it and I did if I was shooting aperture-priority as most wildlife photographers do I would have had to go in and change my ISO and never would have had a prayer of catching that shot it's too slow it's far too slow I'm gonna give you an example I use in Costa Rica he just cracks me up his little face I'm gonna give you a scenario let's say we have a monkey and let's say this monkey is gonna travel across the branch in the first area the branches is going to be really bright then it's gonna be really shady and that's gonna be someplace in the middle we're gonna run a scenario with aperture priority the way we would normally use it okay so let's say that we see him in the bright spot here okay and our camera 64 hundredths of us or I'm sorry eight thousand of a second we noticed our ISO is at 6400 because maybe we were shooting something in dim light earlier well that's not going to do why would I shoot eight thousand of a second with a monkey that's really not moving that fast and I really want to be at five hundred so what do I do in aperture priority I go to my iso i dial it down to four hundred five hundred of a second much better I go good he moved he's gone he went to this spot now my ISO 400 is giving me a thirtieth of a second well that's not gonna work so what do I do ISO and I adjust it to 6400 so I'm back up to five hundredths of a second but guess what by the time I got that done he looked away and he jumped to this other area now I'm at 6400 but now I'm at 2,000 of a second again I don't really want to shoot 6400 if I don't have to so I adjust my ISO to 1600 and guess what happens his backs to mean he's walking away and I think I heard him laugh let's try that again this time with manual and auto ISO what's your speed we want 500 so what do we do we set our camera to 500 we open up our EPS top to whatever we think we need say four or five six whatever you know probably wide open whatever that's it he's in the bright spot I'm taking pictures of him he jumps to the dark spot the camera says hey got little bit darker let me fix that for you camera bumps the ISO to 6400 and meanwhile I don't miss a beat I'm still clicking away there's a guy next to me shoot an aperture priority swearing up a storm sorry he jumped he jumps over to the other area again camera drops say ISO to five I'm sorry just 1600 I can't my shutter speed still five hundredths of a second it stays that way because I set it that way I told the camera this is my priority I want five hundredths of a second for whatever reason I need five hundredths of a second for this that that's a nice combination for me for the amount of movement I'm seeing from him and the amount of movement I would be producing on Mayan five hundredth of a second in this scenario works so let's do that I don't care what the ISO is because if I'm going to be setting these values anyway in aperture priority why not just let the camera take care of it so that's that that's the main though those are the main two reasons one if some action changes or I'm sorry it's a static subject changes to an action subject I am on it instantly and I can even adjust my have stop at the same time I could jump in there and say hey maybe for my flight shots maybe I don't want to be at a four maybe I want a little fudge factor there maybe it's bright out maybe I'll go to f/8 so I could adjust that stuff and I can do it all very very rapidly so anyway let's let's talk about this how do you use this because you brought up the number one problem that I always hear with auto ISO people say I don't want to use auto ISO Steve it makes my pictures noisy no it doesn't you make your pictures noisy your choices your decisions about shutter speeding up stop make your pictures noisy I've seen this time and again the thing is as you saw with our monkey example when we wanted to be at 500 of a second what happened we ended up in the exact same places didn't we if we wanted to get that shot at 500 thousand when he was in that shade what did we have to do we had to set our camera at 6400 whether the camera did it by auto ISO or we did it by changing ISO to 6400 we still end up in the same places the amount of light you have is the amount of light you have if you give the camera a given set of parameters you say hey I want to be at this shutter speed and at this up stop there the last factor ISO is always going to be the same regardless of which mode it's in so what's making our ice auto ISO problems worse than what they really are and I've seen this across the board I've seen all that this happened all this happens all the time especially with Manny with auto ISO people get a little bit greedy with that they say you know what I like this idea this Manny with auto ISO I set the shutter speed cameras in the aperture and the camera sets the ISO well I don't know I'm doing I want to thousandth of a second at f/8 yeah and they do that and then and then they come to me and they say Steve all my pictures are noisy I'm like well there's a reason for that you know if you tilt the camera hey I want to thousands of a second and I want to be at f/8 and the cameras is okay yeah we're gonna need 6400 for that then yeah that's that that's where the problem is and the problem is is then if I say some to somebody okay so let's say you were an aperture priority what would you do oh well I would have capped out at say ISO three 1600 I said well you would have been a 500th of a second then well that was okay well then why don't you ever give her seven mm so I like to tell people I don't - you know trying to be delicate here but this is the big boy in the big girl mode of auto-exposure it really is because you have to take some responsibility here you have to keep an eye on the exposure and what's going on with your eye so at all times watch that ISO in your viewfinder and that hint there on this slide is really important matter of fact even if you don't use this mode if you get into habit of doing what it says there you're gonna be in great shape and that is to get in the habit of checking your settings any time you bring that camera to your eye that is a game-changing piece of advice folks I can't if you've ever had a photo where you looked at it and you said oh I should have done this shutter speed this up stop or I had too much ISO too low ISO whatever this would have saved the day make it a habit before you look at that subject I know it's hard you're like oh my gosh there's a monkey but before you do that let's bring it up look along the bottom what's going on and watch what that ISO is if you don't like that ISO and you're using this mode do something about it maybe we don't need f/8 maybe we could be at five six or a four if you have it maybe we don't need 2,000 of a second maybe 500 or 250 can get the job done so you'd have to think about that stuff when you're looking at the in the viewfinder but the biggest place people get into trouble with this is they set a really high shutter speed and then they don't look at it anymore and then the light drops and then all of a sudden they're in a situation where they're getting these really noisy photos and then it's all auto iso makes my photos noisy I don't get this with that but your priority it's like yeah but you know aperture priority would have dropped you to 30th of a second or whatever in a given scenario and then you would have blurry photos from that but continuing on with that the other piece of advice here is when setting up auto ISO I tell people to use the highest ISO you would ever use and people I qual I don't want to do that you don't have to do it but what I tell people is this let's say unicorn comes out of the woods there's a monkey on this back playing a tambourine how high of an ISO would you have to shoot to say up nope nope I'm going to throw that out I'm gonna delete that whatever that number is go one below now people are like well I don't want to shoot it maybe like for example my dd5 is set at twelve thousand eight hundred that's my cab my da 50 is at 6400 that's that's my cap on that camera I don't want to shoot my d5 at twelve eight hundred I can I don't want to I don't want to shoot my d50 at 6400 but you know what if something really special happens I don't want to have to fiddle with camera menus to get there and I don't worry about shooting my D 850 at 6400 or my d5 at twelve eight hundred on accident because I'm doing that middle hint right there I'm watching what's happening with my ISO and the viewfinder so if I don't like the ISO I just drop my shutter speed and if I can't drop my shutter speed anymore and I can't open up my lens anymore cuz it's so darn dark I have to re-evaluate whether I really want that photo or not because eventually you run out of light sometimes what I like photographers have a hard time getting that one let's see the other one is watch your ISO caps this is the other tip here for this and you have to really be careful with this one my ISO caps I mean if you set your a lot of times people hear this in like wall steve says 6400 on SD at 50 but that's nonsense I'm setting mine to 1600 well you can do that but you have to be aware that you did it and if you get into a situation where you need 64 with the other two settings that you've given the camera the f-stop and the shutter speed the camera has only one choice and that is to underexpose because you're in control of shutter speed you're in control of f-stop so if the camera needs 64 but has to stop at 16 it can only under expose by 2 stops he has nowhere else to go it has nothing else to do and even if you dial exposure compensation guess where it gets that from in this mode for myself so if it's out of ISO it's on ISO so again I say choose the highest one you'd ever use but again you don't have to you it but watch those caps you can have it happen the opposite way to if it's really bright and you have an f4 lens and you're like at a really slow shutter speed say 125th and you're at f4 and it's a bright sunny day guess what your ISO 100 base on your camera is probably not enough you probably need 25 or something like that so you're gonna over expose in that situation but again what you need to do is when you're shooting this stuff keep an eye on what's your cap so you have to know what the caps are in your head and then keep an eye on them in the viewfinder if you see yourself approaching that 12,800 or 6400 or whatever you set it to you know that you you're gonna get in danger of underexposing if it gets too much darker I don't know about Sony and can about know Nikon it'll actually give you a little warning in the viewfinder in the form of on the little exposure meter it'll show it under exposure start to happen so that's the basics I have a video that goes over this very very it's a very basic video it goes over everything in excruciating detail so it's about 10 minutes and you can find on youtube or on my website so if you want more information that's definitely the place to look it'll take everything step by step for you manual mode with auto ISO I think something like that yeah okay let's move on let's talk about compelling compositions take a break from that technical stuff for a minute huh obviously when we're out there in the field doing wildlife photography we need to think about composition and for other photographers that's kind of an easy thing because they usually have a little more time than we do don't they we have to do something fast so sometimes it's really hard to come up with a composition that really works in about two seconds that we have to that we have to do it in so a lot of times we end up in a situation where we have something right in the center of the frame of them are trying to crop afterwards to make something work anyone ever done that we do so let's but let's I'm gonna give you some some of the things that I think about when I'm in the field doing this and these work really fast work really rapidly and I think you'll and you can apply them really quickly and get you it to at least get in the ballpark first is the rule of thirds and golden ratio everyone knows that the ruler is look something like this right and some photos work really well with that one and this particular one I think it worked really good I love the way the everything kind of works with that rule of thirds this kind of balances him out and you have this interesting tree back here so you want some space over here so it worked really well but again you can see you know our basic rule of thirds grid not going to belabor that one now does anyone know what the golden ratio is more or less a serious hands anyone Oh more than I thought usually I get a lot of just confused looks golden ratio is rule of thirds squished in a little bit so it's kind of like this just like I made the grid golden let's call right so I find for wildlife photography if I have to pick between these two but this one usually is a little nicer for a wildlife I don't know why but compositionally I usually favor this one but when I'm in the field I don't like obsess about this stuff what I do is I smile and I do this I think about it in terms of both of them together I do not have a grid like this it might be a finder by the way but instead of being locked into one or the other because we're in a hurry here I know there are people to put rule of thirds grids and their view finders is an overlay and stuff and they're like really like oh I got to get them over just a little bit more these are guidelines just guidelines they get you in the ballpark for a wildlife what I do is I kind of take these intersections like this and just kind of think of them that way right and just as long as stuff is like in that general area where you see those circles yeah I'm pretty happy with that that's gonna be close enough for me to get started and honestly if I have something usually the face in the eye is what I'm putting in there by the way but if I can get the face in the eye and these areas here are the frame probably going to be okay if I have to do a tiny little bit of cropping when I get back to kind of fix it up but at least I'm getting the shot you don't want to obsess about composition I've seen loss I've seen people lose shots about the field it's like just take the picture and of course sometimes centered up works as well so it all depends on the circumstance but the question is how do you know what to do centered should it be rule of thirds golden ratio should just use those circles what do you do I'm gonna give you some tips here for me a lot of it's about balance and flow in the image so for that for example her face is just about the center of the frame normally that's a no-no but honestly I love this composition I think this works really well and it's I think because of the balance here we have her pregnant little belly right here and then we have these leaves over here and it's kind of balancing her out we have some nice flow with these branches little triangle triangles or another thing they say to look for in composition and I'm always looking to kind of if there's elements in the frame I could balance against the subject that are interesting especially that last part that are interesting then I like to go ahead and try to do that again I'm we have this here we have these two diagonals going here and they have a little bird up here and the way of the flower is over here but again I'm thinking about balance in these particular compositions trying to use the environment a little bit and we have some you know we have this nice line coming here like this and I could have taken a shot like this it would have been okay but I think it would I think the one of the tales better I like the tail in there this time and I like how this balances out this a little bit so I'm really thinking about balance when I'm looking at these and when I'm deciding you know should I do rule of thirds or should I do golden ratio or should I be somewhere in the middle or do I want to Center it up how do I know if I want to Center it up in general looking through my own images I didn't even know this until I actually started looking at it but I noticed I tend to place an animal's head towards the center or directly on the center if it's fully facing the camera I don't mean like you know off here and then like this which you'll see in the next slide but like if the animals whole body and head are facing the camera like you saw with that ringneck duck like you see with this this moose seconds before she charged me I'm just kidding she didn't she was thinking about it though I think but I want to have it all in the center usually if they're directly facing me however if they're facing me but like this doing like the zebras he's got his head turned but he's not his whole body isn't really facing me so in this case I'm more of a rule of thirds golden ratio put him in put one of the eyes near one of those circles I showed you kind of kind of scenario here now I may have picked something else here if there was something else interesting going on but there really wasn't I mean this is pretty back here but I didn't want a whole bunch of you know this sunlit sand blowing around over on this side because it kind of made the composition weird so III went I went ahead and did this by the way if you notice not every composition I'm showing you is 2 by 3 or 3 to 2 ratio right it's because I realized that there's a there's a big debate there's always a debate about this if you should just frame what's in the camera that should be it but in my opinion the world doesn't fit in necessarily to a 3 to 2 ratio sometimes it's more of a four by five like we have this you know 8 by 10 sometimes it's you know square and one of the tricks to good composition is thinking about that when you're in the field a little bit because you don't have enough to think about right I haven't given you enough to think about right but thinking about this in the field if I know that I'm gonna do an 8 by 10 I'm gonna want to think about that and make sure I'm leaving adequate space on the science if I think this is gonna work well as an 8 by 10 or if I think it's gonna work well as a square a lot of times if I'm consider if I'm looking at a composition a lot of times I'm looking at it I already know what I want to do and some cameras will actually give you that overlay option but I don't usually use it with wildlife because it's too slow I don't want to be playing with that I want to get the shot don't worry about cropping it in Lightroom I directs you leave some space for where they are looking if an animal's looking at a certain direction the frame generally speaking all of these rules can be broken and there's oh there's good good examples of exceptions of these rules everywhere I'm sure generally speaking I like the animal to have something to look into so instead of putting a little motmot straight in the middle here he's off to the side just to here so that he has a little space to look at over here that was full-frame I shot it like that in the field leave some space where they're looking and where they're traveling if you have an animal running you want to make sure that you have some space in there for them to run into picture this like this at the end of the frame was there and this was over here he'd be like what the heck are we doing watching this guys talk so you need to give them some space to run into now from an autofocus stay upon a lot of times I'll move my autofocus point into a position so that I'm anticipating where that head's going to be so that I don't have to think about this composition when he's running past me because you're like well how do you do that when they're running you do it before they run that's the trick another thing that I've found is that the more the head is turned for me personally again I'm just sharing what I'm doing the more the head is turned the more I tend to put them towards the side but not always not always but a lot of times if I have a hard head turn like this guys heads turned pretty pretty hard here and there's some interest over here too so that helps you know balance it out a little bit it's something I'm thinking about too oh my gosh if I can drill one compositional lesson into everybody it's this one probably you don't need the whole animal when I'm out shooting with people either in workshops or just in general one of the things that I like to tell them is you're doing one or two things you're either shooting for a field guide or you're shooting to create a compelling image which is it if you're shooting for a field guide than you probably need the whole animal but if you're like the rest of us that want to create something pretty and artistic or whatever you don't need the whole animal every single time sometimes it's nice to have the whole animal if it's interesting but this is probably my favorite squirrel monkey photo and you can only see about 1/3 of the monkey but I think it's better than any of my other squirrel monkey photos I really enjoy the shot and you know it's because that he's kind of piqued him through then you're only seen apart there's a little bit of mystery there so don't be afraid to crop the animal if you need to the trick with that it's not to crop it off in weird places like I wouldn't want to crop off just a toe or just the tip of a tail or things like that you know get in there and you know kind of own it whatever you're doing crop it in a way that is deliberate and is sending the message that you want to send it another one we didn't you know don't have the whole animal here is fine everyone knows what the rest of that looks like and honestly this is the cutest part believe me but don't let them look away what I mean by that is when I'm shooting wildlife I like this I like from a profile too forward on either side 180 degrees this way once they start kind of turning away from you though you lose the connection and again this goes all the way back to that first point that I made about you got to kind of love these guys a little bit right because if you don't stuff like that doesn't really matter to you because you're now you don't care about the connection as much but for me if an animal's really starting to look away it looks like they are defensive they're scared they're trying to get away that's not what I want to portray my wildlife I want to show people the the connection side of this so you know just you know I always watch that one of the best examples is when you watch people do bird in flight shots and I see some laughter you know what I'm gonna say don't yet they sit there and here's the bird gggggg now it's starting to fly away and they are just as excited as its flying way and in my workshop so I'll call him out on that I'll be like so what so so what were you doing there what you good to do with all those macaw rear end shots I don't know just fill in the buffer wait for and anticipate perfect moments these guys were in Yellowstone and he was you know it's that time here and I'd seen them kind of do this behavior a couple of times not these two in particular but they were places just it wasn't it wasn't a shot but he positioned himself in such a way that I was like okay if I move over here and he's here she's not in the frame yet I just focused on his eye because I saw her walking over and I'm like I know what's gonna happen this is one of the advantages of just hanging out with animals some of the best wildlife photographers I think don't care if they even get a shot they just like being there watching this but you start to see these behaviors and it's like okay when she comes up they're gonna sniff and I'm gonna catch that because I finally have a good angle to get this so she starts coming in and I'm waiting and I have the autofocus point where I want the composition set up I wait for her she walks right into that composition fire away and we got it shows you can I realize sometimes things happen that are unexpected or if you've never seen a behavior before it can take you by surprise and sometimes we miss those shots and that's kind of how wildlife photography works the more time you're out there the better you get at it and the more you see stuff like this they would know how to get sharp photos anyone want to know that let's talk about getting sharp photos this is something that comes across probably more than any other topic do I need you know this lens with that lens which is sharp or how do I get sharp photos so let's let's talk the first one is this one here use enough shutter speed I have probably at least on a weekly if not multiple times a week I have somebody send me a question say see if I'm just not getting sharp photos and I'm like yeah and I'll say it maybe sometimes depending on how busy I am I might say well why don't you send me a few images I'll take a look and let me tell you every single time they think it is the camera it is the lens or maybe the lens and the fine tuning or the micro adjustment or maybe there's an element out of whack and the list goes on and on the only thing that they don't think about the shutter speed it's insane but this is probably the biggest problem I see so many times when people say I'm not getting sharp images when I look at those images I see motion blur and a lot of that comes from the idea that something like 250 or 500 of a second is fast and if you sit back and really think about one five hundredths of one second it does seem fast I mean from an armchair photographer standpoint it's like God you know 500 should be able to stop any action right the wildlife photographers are like no but it's sometimes very difficult to convince people that they need more shutter speed but when I tell them hey go out use a little more shutter speed next time are you sure yeah just try just try it and they'll go out and they'll try to use that more more shutter speed and guess what get an email week later oh my gosh you're right I tried it these are such-and-such to speed and this is so much better I'm getting so many more keepers it's like yep that's the way that works but nine times out of ten if someone's experiencing a sharpness problem they look everywhere except this and this is this is usually the promise shutter speed I'm gonna give you some suggestions shutter speeds again I'm going to give you guys a link to the PDF if you want it to birds in flight sixteen hundred to four thousand thirty two is my personal favorite I like that one a lot that seems to really freeze the action almost every bird almost every time but I have shot birds in flight and I've shot believe it or not shot hummingbirds at 125th of a second had sharp hummingbirds people think those are hard they just hover as long as they don't move too much to get them but you don't this is these are just guidelines here but 16 to 4,000 is a good starting place slower birds you can do 16 some of this depends on your panning technique the better you are and following the bird generally speaking the slower the shutter speed you can get away with like I say 3200 is kind of my all-time favorite just because it seems like that really gives me a high keeper rate which by the way the higher the shutter speed the higher the keeper rate duh right but sometimes people get a little too conservative when they shouldn't and it's important when you think about once-in-a-lifetime type shots are really tough to get shots that you don't want to have a shot that you miss because your shutter speed is a little too low you've been a little too conservative that time let me give you an example that's a fish these Snowy Egrets this we found these guys on Merritt Island and it's a behavior I've seen quite a few times what they do is when they get to a shallow pool they'll start hovering and they'll go back and forth they'll get three or four of them and they'll basically hover above it and when they see a fish in flight they will grab it bring it up just like this and it's like and it happens in a split second it's not something you can anticipate it's not something you can I don't even know that I've ever actually seen it with my eyes but I've captured with the camera it happened so quick I decided that I wanted to try to get a shot like this one so next time we saw some of these guys doing their little hover fish technique we went over there and I set up shot about 700 shots that morning of this now I have 699 900 down had that many good ones but I have a ton of really great shots of them doing this behavior where the wings in different positions and all that but that wasn't what I was looking for that day when I was looking for was this how about a six of these two home with wings clipped 600 Melanie I'm always trying to fill the frame sometimes I get greedy so two of them with wings clipped three of them were facing away from the camera a little bit we just talked about why I don't like that one of them was like this 700 pictures I got one got one that I wanted is it and that's what it took going back to shutter speed you can bet that I was using like it was either 32 or 4,000 of a second because my keeper rate was so high with that shutter speed I know that there's virtually no chance I'm gonna have a problem with movement on that with that shutter speed now maybe you know I miss focus or maybe I'll click wings or things like that but I know that motions not going to be a problem so I went with the safer shutter speed on this I wanted to make sure because if I did get one the last thing I wanted to do was go in that computer and look at that thing and say oh look a little bit of motion blur I can't use it so again it seems like kind of a minor thing and an obvious thing the higher your shutter speed the better your keeper rate but sometimes you know when you're looking for that one shot you just don't want to have that one image in the series that you really wanted or that's really special you don't wanna have a little bit of motion blur destroying it let's see another trick for birds at least it sees a faster shutter speed during takeoff you ever tried taking a takeoff shot of a bird's always frustrating alright those are a little bit harder to get them the regular end flights and there's two reasons that have that that you run into that problem the first one is your tracking system on your autofocus says they're quite fully engaged at that point one of the things I like about the d5 actually over the da 50 is that it's autofocus kind of engages a little bit quicker than the 850 s does it starts tracking just a split second I mean fractional but it does sometimes make a difference but the other reason that really plays to this point here is that you're not tracking yet either are you when they take off it's not like the birds sitting on the branch and like oh he's going to take off let me start panning there he goes it's not how that works you're on the Burt and then he takes off for then you jerk the camera so you're panning technique at that moment is terrible to non-existent so you're gonna need a little bit more shutter speed because when you're panning you're helping with that shutter speed you're helping the shutter speed capture that motion right but when you're just first starting off you're really not giving it any aid so using a faster speed during takeoff is a good idea as a bonus tip to that using a little bit smaller f-stop isn't the worst idea either so if you normally shoot maybe a 4 try five six and you're at five six try off a drop it down maybe a little bit to get a little bit more depth of field just for that little bit of fudge factor it's not gonna with a long lens that's not going to make a huge difference but if the bird is just slightly off with f/4 maybe a five six or eight maybe it was okay so sometimes that works too again this depends if you have the light to do it though as far as mammal action I'm usually 12 52 mm I find that pretty adequate sometimes you do need more yeah I mean if I was cheated with a you know gazelle or cheetah with a wildebeest or something yeah I probably I'm good want something a little more adequate than that but 1252 mm is pretty good I think this was at 1600 or 2,000 and no sharpness issues there of course you do have to balance this as someone mentioned with ISO but if you have the light I always recommend using a little higher shutter speed if you have the light you want to make sure that you don't end up in a situation where you didn't have enough shutter speed you notice your ISO was at 100 you go gosh I could easily go up another notch or two there and still gotten a shot and not you know I had to deal with anything you know on modern camera is anything under what a thousand is probably spectacular regardless of the you know which camera were talking about many of them quite a bit higher this is a good example he's losing his lunch but I was at I think this was for tesota Beach to these turns were diving in you know how they do getting minnows and stuff and I was just playing around plenty of light this is you know I was about to leave let's put it that way that's where the light was at this point I was about to leave I was like I'll try a few of these are frontlet they're probably okay so I took a few shots and I think it was I get four thousand six thousand I was way up there but because my yeah I'm shooting like a four or five six and I was like you know ISO 200 or 400 why not use the faster shutter speed in those situations however sometimes a slower shutter speed can work too like for panning shots and mammals I'm usually around 15 to 6 sixtieth of a second someplace in there one fifteen to one sixtieth that works pretty well this was it I think a 20th of a second and that can be fun too I'm not nearly as picky about like super tack sharp eyes I like sharp eyes like recognizable like decent but you know I don't have to be able to count every eyelash either with my panning shots but what you need for panning though does vary depending on what you're photographing and how fast it's moving our close to this to the camera the idea is that you want to get kind of a blurred background like this and well having the animals sharp now in some cases you can probably go upwards of two hundred fiftieth of a second if it was a fast bird flying by and still get that effect especially if it's a close range so usually this is a good place to start though and I also recommend using a tripod or some kind of support when you can so that the pan is the only thing that's the variable there's no up and down it's just across just food for thought for static subject so sixtieth to one 250th can work you know depends on you know what the support is on your end you have you're using a tripod and stuff you know I've shot stuff at sixtieth of a second perfectly fine a lot of times if I'm on a tripod I'll be 125th 250 is a very safe speed for me on a tripod it depends on the animals movement too though right for more active subject 250 to 1250 is kind of my my favorite range don't know why 1259 a thousand but I just I like that number there that works really well it seems like when I use that for subjects that are somewhat active but not crazy active that's that gives me a pretty good keeper rate for hand-holding this is the question I get all the time people say hey Steve I have a 600 F for what can i handhold that yeah what kind of shutter speed can I use to handle that I'm like I don't know I have no idea I can tell you what I do but that's not gonna help you at all because I don't know what you can do I have a friend they can hold hand hold my 500 PF @ thirtieth of a second and get tax sharp images every time and I kind of hate him a little for it no I'm just kidding he's probably hears me he's gonna be mad at me but no I mean he can handle all that lens and he'd get really sharp photos I have zero chance of being able to do something like that zero I'm not going to get it at that speed not handheld so everybody's ability to handhold a lens varies and we were actually talking about this on the break and one of the best suggestions I can give you is you know even if you know yeah I live in Northwest Ohio so I know a lot of folks here you know you live in Chicago and the thing is you know go to local parks I know deer are not the most exciting animal you know I mean we're shooting the same stuff here on our homes I know it's not the most exciting thing to shoot and songbirds and Robins but there is so much value to be gained by just going out to the park on a regular basis and learning to use the gear and things like this will be very obvious - you will never ask somebody what can I handhold something I because you're gonna know and you know this also has there's some other variation with hand holding - you know it depends how excited you are you know I tell people you know what you can handhold when you're taking a picture your cat in a living room it's probably going to be different then the first time a grizzly bear is walking up to you so you know there's a lot of variables are babies spectacled ow very fortunate to find that is a rare find this year in Costa Rica but one of the tricks that I use all the time is to use bursts when using slower shutter speeds and the way I look at it is like this imagine that you had a situation where maybe at 60th of a second on a loose gimble head on a tripod you were able to get 20% of your photos adequately sharp ok now might by the way my standards for sharpness are kind of insane and I should stop doing it like that I tell people not to do what I do but you know I'm looking at 200% crops you know I'm really zoomed in when I'm looking at mine so I'm very particular but yeah depending on you know how particularly art is going to depend on what you can tolerate but let's say for example though that that means one in your one in five shots are gonna be at the level of sharpness that you want the other ones might be close it might be even good enough in a pinch but one in five at sixtieth of a second on a loose skin but with that like a 600 f/4 or whatever you know one in five of those is gonna be tax sharp so this is why I do this I use longer bursts when I'm using slower shutter speeds because I'm just playing the numbers game if I have a subject I'm gonna be you know I'm in low light I'm gonna have to use a slower shutter speed I'll sit there and I'll rattle off 15 or 20 shots in a row knowing full well that most of them aren't going to be sharp enough for me but you know what I'm gonna have a few in there that are now this gets some weird looks when you're sitting there with your D 5 and this poor I was like what are you but it works it works it gets you those images on your card those sharp images you know they may not wish up maybe they will all be shared but who cares what you want is that one or one or two so that you have a nice tack sharp image at the end of the day and this works out really really well so I tell people the slower the shutter speed the longer the burst and it's funny after a week or so if should be with me in Costa Rica sometimes people can say oh he must be the slow shutter speed he's really going long on this especially if it's just holding still use burst what AF is uncertain I think we've all had that happen heav'nly we've had a subject like this you have a low contrast low light very difficult to focus subject on the autofocus like I don't know what to do it's kind of jittery whenever it does that that's another time I'll use bursts because oftentimes I'll have some in that burst that are right on the eye some that are a little behind some that are a little in front but by using bursts I increase my odds of getting a nice tack sharp image in a situation where the AF is a little bit uncertain now this doesn't happen very often but black bears are like my nemesis when it comes to autofocus they are the hardest things oh consider subject motion you guys ready for a story so this guy was in a local pond I'd taken my dog for a walk that morning and I saw the frogs there and I'm like okay it's frog time I'm going out I'm gonna go take care of I'm gonna get myself some nice macros so I go down there and this was with a d7000 I'm in the muck I have no choice because guess what I don't have is a flip screen so I have to really get down there I am in the most awkward positions you can imagine mosquitoes heard there was an all-you-can-eat buffet over by the Frog and believe me they were you know they were taking an advantage so I'm down there as low as I can get and focusing on his eye getting eaten alive and I focus pop it off look at the back of the camera which unfortunately because it was not a flip screen and tailed me going like this because of the sticks and stuff that were in the way so I'm like okay that's not sharp put it back down in the muck get everything reset and of course you have to move slow because you know you don't want to skip the Frog away so focus on the eye this time I went all out live you mirror up cabe release still still not sure now part of the problem was you know the shutter speed I I mean it was a slow shutter speed I was probably at like 15th or 10th of a second and I have a polarizer on there to help eliminate some of the reflections by the way hint polarizer for macro subjects really cool but I tried this several times and I was not getting too sharp photo and it didn't make any sense because there's nothing there's no reason for it no reason at all so it finally occurred to me as the blood was training but the stupid frog was breathing how dare he but he was over there he had the audacity to be breathing Sue's like and that little bit of movement was just enough to get that eye out of critical focus each and every time so I refocused on I'm had everything perfect and just as I was about to shoot it I go like that he goes and I go click and I looked at the back of the camera and I left about 10 pounds less blood in me but man I got that shot the other trick is to loop use the lowest ISO possible obviously the higher our ISO gets the more it starts to overwhelm the detail in the image which by the way that's another good reason not to crop because the further something is out smaller the detail is relative to the noise so something else to think about by the way I have a whole article on cropping that you guys should probably read on my website when you get a chance goes over a lot of that stuff but anyway using the lowest ISO possible is always something that you want to try to try to take advantage of and one of the ways I do that is with something I dubbed like ISO Insurance anyone who's done any wildlife knows the other type of insurance that we do and that's the distance one right you have an animal that's a little too far away a little skittish we take a couple of pictures at first then we do this right we keep walking up to well this is the same thing but with ISO so this is an ant bird which these are actually pretty cool what they do in the rain forest you have some army ants and they go along and the army ant swarms are going along and the bugs come flying up and they don't eat the ants they eat the bugs that the army ants kick up so they're pretty active little guys when the army ants swarms are come along and they're kind of a pain to shoot because yeah there's army ants around and they will bite so I started off at like five hundredths of a second now you have to remember the situation it's hot it's miserable there's army ants all over the place the tripod is not on anything that remotely resembles stable ground it was like on some spongy stuff the bird is like lick lick all over the place so five hundredths of a second was a nice safe shutter speed I was able to get plenty of sharp photos there but if you do the math that puts it over ISO 8,000 pretty bad even with the d5 I don't want to be there but I had my safety shots I had my shots at the higher shutter speeds and that's the trick get your safety shots if the animals still there let's drop another stop try 250 didn't get as many but I got a few dropped to 125th after I was satisfied with my 250th of a second shots that dropped me all the way down to ISO 2200 which is still kind of high but not really on a d5 it was okay so I was like okay let me try this and didn't get quite as many at 125th but I did get this one that I really liked tried sixtieth of a second and as you can see that didn't work out because this is the one you're looking at but I kept dropping that ISO after I made sure that I had my shot now had I just left it at the safe speed of five hundredths of a second like many people do I would have had a bunch of ISO 8007 use wouldn't have used any of them but because I kept ratcheting it down I was able to get lucky and get one that was much lower ISO and the same quality of the same nice poses something similar I had it five hundredths of a second and every single one of these poses was different this is a little bit easier to do if you have a very static subject but in this case I went ahead and did it anyway because I wanted to see if I can get something nice and slow but and by the way if you do try this technique an editing tip for you start at the bottom work your way up so I would have I started at the 60th of a second ones and went to the 125th so I kept otherwise what happens is if you start at the top at the faster ones you start working your way down and you find something at 500 or 250 like oh that's a nice so I'm just gonna use that I'll just try to clean it up you get lazy sometimes if you have hundreds of photos to go through so start from the bottom up and you know when you find your first keeper there you go hi there remember when I mentioned there was a spot where I needed to interject a couple of lines in the video you made it this is it what's missing is the part where I mentioned that I try to use single point autofocus for the majority of my wildlife photography and in fact for static or at least relatively static subjects single point is the only thing I use I only jumped to the larger areas for faster action so there you go let's rejoin almost across the board and this is a great example I use this all the time this photo to illustrate this because if I was using something like a wider area or group AF especially on a Nikon it definitely would have caught on these leaves and it would have been a fight to get it on those eyes and even some areas AF areas that are wider but have a priority for an auto focus point Nikon does that I think Canon does too and probably Sony imagine as well even when they prioritize an autofocus point if they have a hard time getting a lock the other autofocus points then try to do it on their own so that can be a problem so with my Nikon if I would have been like on dynamic 25 for instance that would have given me a primary point that I could have tried on the eye and then another 25 around here but these eyes are a little bit tricky on a sloth so it may have said hey this is kind of hard but this is easy I'm going to go for this so always use a smallest AF point possible plus going back to what we said in about matrix metering matrix metering is going to give a little more weight to a single point autofocus setup than it would something that was a wider area to now of course you can't use single point all the time I mean I have done it for birds before but in a lot of cases the advice that I get for bird photography is simply this use the smallest area that you can get away with so if it's single point and you're that good teach me but what I do is I start off with smaller ones and then I work my way up to the larger ones so if my really small one I can't stay on the bird I'm missing the bird all the time I'll then go to another step up I'll go to another size up the next size up and if that doesn't work then I'll go up in another to a larger area and I'll get incrementally larger but most of the time I never have to use that whole wide area and the advantage with that not just beyond getting this is the metering part of it but the other advantage to that is that kind of isolates it lets you isolate where the cameras should be focusing so the cameras not necessarily trying to get this wing because it's got this big gigantic area if my auto focus area is just this big and his face is right here in the middle it's probably gonna get the pace and that's what we want does anyone use back but now most of them let's see here if you haven't tried it I recommend you give it a try I have been using it for a long time and it works really well for what I do it's not for everybody some people like it some people don't and let me go over some points here for many people it is a faster setup but it's not faster because the autofocus is faster that's a common misconception with back button AF people think that it makes the autofocus system in the camera run faster it does not the camera doesn't care where the AF input comes from whether it's a shutter release or the back button it doesn't matter the speed of your AF system is going to be the same but from a usability standpoint some people think that it's faster for them to to use it and just prefer the feel of it that's fine what it does is it decouples auto focus operation shadow release so instead of focusing with our shutter obviously we're focusing with the back button on the shutters just taking pictures like it did in the film more days this is why we use back button autofocus this means that you no longer need AFS and AFC can use AFC exclusively this is what really throws people because a lot of people think that it's for ergonomics or for speed or things like that but this is actually the real reason that back button focus is so cool and let me show you why this is a pretty typical AFS scenario right so how would we do this I'm going to use the laser pointer normally let's say his eye is outside the AF field here on a full frame camera so you'd get maybe an autofocus point that was close and maybe just use a center and then you go up here you'd focus on him and then you'd recompose you to hold that shutter release half down and then you'd take your picture right that's okay that works but what happens if this happens well now you're an AFS guess what AFS does not do single servo does not track so you don't get that so all right fine let's put it in continuous AF so you focus on this with continuous AF you take your finger off the release and then you go to take your picture thinking you're gonna trick the camera and then you press down and the camera instantly focus is on this leaf back here in his eyes out of focus but you can get this when he takes off now there is a footnote here you can use like AF lock some people prefer to do that so that means I could be an AFC I could focus on this I could hold a up lock in and then recompose and shoot my brain is not wired like that I need my when I press a button I like stuff to happen that stuff to stop so for some people though the other way does work so just throwing out options but let's go back to this now let's say we're back button autofocus we're at AFC continuous servo focus on the eye take our thumb off of the back button focus distance is now gonna stay fixed it's not gonna change the lens isn't going to refocus I can recompose and shoot Oh saw some exhaust he's gonna fly guess what I just press the autofocus button and start focusing and I get this and I get you have the best of both worlds instantly that's why we use back button autofocus and I do have a video about this that explains this in detail and why it works and and goes over all this stuff so if here like on the fence with back button autofocus it's a good thing to take a watch the other thing is that this does take some practice a lot of times people use it like that feels weird just give it a give it time just try a little bit alright let's talk about some tricky light scenarios here I always I'm wondering to be smiling or salivating I don't know so the first trick that I want to talk about in tricky light is focus and refocus okay sometimes we get into tricky light scenarios and the cameras having a heck of a time focusing and sometimes what will happen is it will get a false positive meaning that it pretends there seems to be locked in it's not focusing anymore but it's not really focusing quite where we want it and a lot of times you can't quite tell because it's very close but it's not quite there I use a black bear in this example because it happens with these guys a lot it kind of gets there but it doesn't quite get there and I think part of that is a concave face too but in any event one of the tricks I use in tricky light if I see the camera is struggling if it's trying to focus you know if you go to focus it's like in and out and in and out and you finally get it to focus and it's a little jittery and it seems to lock on what I'll do is in that situation I'll focus I'll take a burst of you know four or five shots and then I'll release the autofocus and shutter release then I'll just slightly slightly D focus the lens then I'll refocus again and I'll repeat the procedure as many times as the animal let me I did it with this guy because he was looking at me for a long time and what that does is it will get you sometimes every single set that you take will be tack sharp but if the camera was really getting some false positives in there you'll end up with a series that some are sharp at the eye where you want it and some maybe not so much and that's exactly what happened with him we were in the Smokies and we went to take some photos I went to take some photos of this guy I thought there's like a bunch of people behind me until afterwards by the way that was funny that's like I'm like oh he won't bother me bike bears never attack two people or more at once and there's all these people behind me and I looked behind me everyone's gone like oh that was nice but when I got back that's the technique I used on him and when I got back to the computer and I looked through my images I was surprised that only maybe 30 or 40% of them of the sets that I ended up taken were actually sharp right on the eye where I wanted it the other ones the camera said that it got it but it was a little bit off so I was really glad I used that focus and refocused trick there and I use this all the time people say well how do you do that it takes so long you would be amazed how quickly you can do that now if you have to put the camera into full manual focus it depends on the camera I believe Nikon and Canon both allow you to Nikon for sure allows you just to grab the focus ring and manually override but you'd be surprised how quick it's like I mean just 1 2 3 4 very quick it doesn't take any time at all but definitely give that a try and I do have a video on that as well it's gonna have a lot of video homework right I also use that same trick if I'm in a situation where it's snowing and raining and things like that because sometimes you get a raindrop just at the wrong moment or a snowflake just at the wrong moment now you guys get snow here right but you get something right in front of the eye just at the wrong moment and it's pretty close and the camera is like yeah that seems about right especially if there's something with decent contrast sometimes like yeah that's that looks right and it's really not so a lot of times if I'm in a situation like this I'll do that as well and sometimes you'll see images some are a little sharper than others by the way another good time to do a little bit extra bursting I find is in situations like this where we have this rain coming down are the snow coming down because sometimes your perfect shot has snowflake right over the eye or a raindrop right over there so I always take a little bit more time to burst and take a few more images whenever I have some precipitation going on number to rough it and manually and go for edges this is another good one here this guy was in Deer wetlands in Florida and actually it's not a guy I think this is a female and I was driving along found her and it was pretty dip and the camera is have you ever hit your camera go in and out and not focus right well one of the things that happens there I think is that the camera the manufacturers try to do it so that the camera can get locked on as rapidly as possible but the problem is in a really low light low contrast scenario what happens is that it zips right by those low contrast areas in its effort to rapidly get an auto focus line so one of the tricks that I've learned over the years that I do quite frequently is and it's kind of related to that other thing we just talked about is I'll just manually focus as close as I can and then press the autofocus button to kind of clean it up and then because the cameras phase detection AF system can now see that there is a little bit of contrast there it latches on to that and locks on to what to the subject and that can make a really big difference there I use that very frequently when I'm out and the camera seems to be struggling or having a hard time locking on or zipping back and forth just kind of rough it in and get it closed and a lot of times the camera will be able to go ahead and lock on now the other thing is the reason I use the route the Rick come here is you can look for an edge this little edge right here now if you focus straight on the eye you know it may have a little bit of a struggle there but if you go right on that edge there it's gonna be alright and sometimes you can use that as kind of a starting point if you want it to then you can bring it down to the eye and fine-tune it or depending on what the lenses like a five six lens or something I would probably to have enough depth of field to keep that eye as sharp as you'd want so definitely a good trick stuff that I use quite frequently number three use the center a at point and recompose now I realize that you just had a big one talk about how not to use the center point and recompose but there is an exception of the rule and that is this particular scenario right here if you get new situation where you're trying to make your composition and you move your autofocus point over and the camera is just not getting it it's just not focusing try the center point the center point is probably going to be a cross type sensor it's probably more sensitive than the other sensors or is among the most sensitive of the sensors that you have available it's also positioned in the best possible location for phase detect out of focus based checked out of focus works by looking at two sides of a lens and anything in the center is going to see that better than stuff off to the sides right that makes sense so your Center AF point is generally the best one if you're having a hard time getting a lock on a subject so definitely focus right on those eyes with the center point and try it that way if you can't get one of those outside wants to do it most of the time it works most of the time it'll get you there of course you then have to recompose any after it whenever you're focusing and recomposing you have to really make sure that animal's head is staying where it's supposed to stay here's a lot of times you'll focus recompose they go oh no wait hold on okay now no you go back and forth like that constantly fighting it with the camera but for the most part you know this can work in low-light situations I still recommend make your composition first and then move your AF point but in the event that you can't get a lock with that AF point go back to the center alright believe it or not we are to the question part does anybody have any questions that does it you made it thanks so much for watching and I hope you enjoyed the presentation however it's really just the tip of the iceberg if you want more information make sure you check out my ebooks secrets to exposure metering for nikon secrets to the nikon focus system and secrets to stunning wildlife photography all are jam-packed with hundreds of tips tricks and advice even more detailed than what you just saw in that presentation also be sure to click the little bell icon so you're always notified when I post a new video remember to subscribe and finally don't miss out on my free email newsletter you can sign up at the site and you'll never miss a video a blog post or a podcast thanks so much for watching have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 359,319

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, wildlife photography, CAPS, photographing wildlife, sharp wildlife photos, better wildlife photos, taking wildlife photos, how to do wildlife photography, wildlife photo tips, wildlife photography help

Id: R9YBeNBoKVw

Length: 147min 38sec (8858 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019