What is the focal length of a telescope shooting birds in the wild?

300mm telephoto zoom lens (high-quality telephoto lens is generally expensive, but the imaging is excellent), plus x 1.4 or x2 telephoto lens will have a telephoto close to 600mm, but note that the maximum aperture will be reduced accordingly after adding telephoto lens.

Skills:

(A) must use telephoto lens

Birds often fly in the sky, eat in the water, or rest in trees. To take a big and clear picture, you need a telephoto lens of 300mm, 400mm or even 800 mm. You can start with some cheap 300mm telephoto zoom lenses (high-quality telephoto lenses are generally expensive, but the imaging is excellent), plus X 1.

(2) Don't turn the aperture to the maximum.

Although taking a shallow depth of field with a large aperture can blur the background, it is easy to make the depth of field shallow under a long focus (refer to the teaching of taking a shallow depth of field), and birds will move, so too shallow depth of field is easy to blur the subject. Therefore, f/5.6-8 aperture should be used when shooting birds to keep the depth of field within a reasonable range and highlight the subject.

(3) the shutter should be fast

In order to determine the shutter speed to be maintained according to the action of the bird to be photographed, a relatively fast shutter speed is usually used. For birds, their movements can be clearly captured at or above 1/800s, which is relatively calm, while for stationary birds, it is best to keep the lowest shutter speed of 1/250s (if using telephoto, remember to meet the "safety shutter" to avoid hand shock).

(d) Don't be afraid to use high ISO.

In the second and third points, we know that the aperture should not be too large and the shutter should be fast, so in order to get the correct exposure of birds, we need to improve ISO! Using high ISO in broad daylight will not obviously affect the photo quality, and now the denoising function of camera built-in or post-production software is also very mature, so don't be afraid to use high ISO! According to the ambient light at that time, as well as ISO800, 1600, etc., adjust the appropriate ISO value. Enough to use a high-speed shutter.

(5) Make good use of "field measurement"

Generally, cameras also have three different metering systems, and the most commonly used one is "balanced metering". However, in order to make the target birds have the correct exposure, you can adjust the camera to "spot metering" to keep the birds at the metering point, so that even if they shoot into the sky, the birds will not become underexposed. Note that when some cameras are set to Spot Metering, it only measures the spot metering in the middle. Please test your camera first!

(6) Use continuous autofocus (AI-Servo/AF-C) and intermediate autofocus.

For birds, you can make good use of the camera's "continuous autofocus" function (AI-Servo/AF-C), or turn on AF multi-point area focusing or autofocus, so that the camera will automatically keep the focus on birds. Note that the speed and accuracy of focus tracking are related to the level of the camera. Usually, the middle of the camera has the strongest focusing ability. You can put the bird in the middle and then use the cropping function to make a second composition.

(7) Shooting original documents

RAW files are the most tolerant of light and shade, and sometimes the white feathers of birds will be slightly overexposed or underexposed, and the "highlights" and "shadows" of RAW editor can also be used for lossless correction.

(8) Understand the target birds

It is best to know the habitat habits, predation location, time and behavior of the target birds online first, so as to capture their beauty more accurately.

(9) Use a monopod

Holding a heavy lens and fuselage is easy to get tired, so a monopod can not only reduce the weight, but also make the camera more stable, which is very helpful for shooting birds.