And it takes a lot of patience to be a good bird photographer because they almost never do what you want them to do while you are ready to get the shot. So you wait through seemingly endless rituals of feather cleaning and preening to get the shot that you have in mind. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it never happens. That's ok because there is always another opportunity for a great bird shot just around the corner.
Their constant motion, of course, means that you are going to need a relatively fast shutter speed to make sure that you freeze the action. But fast shutter speeds usually spells either really high ISO choices, and the resultant extra noise in the image, or wide apertures. If you opt for a wide open aperture on your lens, this means that the depth of field, or everything that will be in sharp focus in the shot, is often amazingly small.
So what do you focus on to make sure that it's a great shot? It's the eyes man! More than any other body part, just make sure that the bird's eyes are razor sharp, and in most cases you will have a good shot.
How do you do that? Well for me, I use spot focusing and I constantly put the focus sensor on the bird's eye and then recompose in the viewfinder to get the best composition. I may do this several times in a minute when the bird is moving around, but I want to make sure that I get those eyes in sharp focus!
Here is an example of getting the eye tack sharp:
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| Click to enlarge |
See my latest nature and wildlife images at:
www.duanelipham.com
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