Introduction to photography: bird shooting skills

Lead: Students who have been familiar with reading photography for a long time should have heard the term "exposure iron triangle": aperture, shutter and ISO are the basis of photographic exposure. For beginners, aperture prerequisites may often be used, focusing on aperture and ISO, but the understanding of shutter is not profound. This time, let the tutor share 10 the necessary knowledge about shutter. How many do you know?

Know your target bird.

Students may wish to learn about the habitat habits, predation location, time and behavior of the target birds on the Internet first, so as to capture their beauty more accurately.

Use tripod and cable to release.

It's easy to get tired with a heavy lens and fuselage. You might as well start using a tripod, which can not only reduce the weight, but also make the camera more stable, which is very helpful for shooting birds!

It is suggested to use the cable release (such as RST7 10 1 cable release) to control the camera to take pictures, so as to prevent the camera surface from shaking and damage the integrity of the picture. Effectively reduce the camera shake caused by finger pressing the shutter, and the photo effect is clearer.

A telephoto lens must be used

Birds often fly in the sky, eat in the water, or rest in trees. They want to take big and clear photos and practice with telephoto lenses of 300mm, 400mm or even 800mm (high-quality telephoto lenses are generally expensive, but the imaging is excellent).

Don't turn the aperture to the maximum.

Although a large aperture can make the shallow depth of field blur the background, it is easy to make the depth of field shallow under long focus, and birds will move, so too shallow depth of field will easily 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.

When using telephoto lens, you can achieve obvious shallow depth of field effect without large aperture. The aperture used in this photo is f/5.6 and the focal length is 130mm.

The shutter should be fast

According to the action of the bird to be photographed, determine the shutter speed to be maintained. Generally, a relatively fast shutter speed is used. For birds, it is relatively calm to capture their movements clearly at 1/800s or above. When birds are resting, it is best to keep the minimum shutter speed at1/250 s.

Shooting birds in flight requires a fast shutter speed, so this photo was taken with a shutter of 1/800 s.

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! Adjust the appropriate ISO value according to the ambient light at that time. ISO800, 1600, etc. Enough for you to use a high-speed shutter!

Make good use of "spot metering"

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

Using spot metering can make feathers have correct exposure.

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

For birds, we can make good use of the camera's "continuous autofocus" function, or turn on AF multi-point area focusing or autofocus, so that the camera will automatically focus on birds. Note that the speed and accuracy of focus tracking are related to the horizontal line of the camera. Usually, the focusing ability in the middle of the camera is also the strongest, so students can put the bird in the middle and then use the cropping function to make a second composition.

Shoot the original file

The RAW file is the most tolerant of light and shade, and sometimes the white feathers of birds will be slightly overexposed or underexposed. We can also use the "highlights" and "shadows" of RAW editor for lossless correction.