Juvenile Little Blue Heron

After an unsuccessful beach trip earlier, this little guy was waiting for me outside the house. A little nervous at first, but once I sat down he wandered back over to where I was.

As usual, 50D + 400/5.6

First I thought Egret, but then noticed the oddly colored legs. Sibley guide and a couple of birding forums helped figure it out.


Looks quite different from the adult:


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Resting Anhinga

50D, 400/5.6

Caught this very relaxed looking Anhinga outside the house.

I am not sure if it's the same one that keeps showing up or if they are rotating, but they really aren't particularly scared of me wandering around there taking pictures of them lately. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if they enjoy posing!
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David and Goliath

50D, 400/5.6
The beach is pretty dead this time a year as far as birding goes, but now and then some arrive and provide a little entertainment and photo opportunities.




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High key gull

Sometimes you screw up and get lucky. (50D, 400/5.6)

I really do prefer manual mode for most of my shooting, but on occasion a combination of light change (e.g. sun coming out from behind a heavy cloud) and changing angles can result in some serious exposure errors if you aren't paying attention. Well, I wasn't, and ended up with this shot. Played with the raw file a bit and I could possibly rescue it in post processing, but decided to leave it as is; a somewhat ethereal bird portrait. (More)

Flying low

50D, 400/5.6

It's always fascinating to watch the pelicans; such skilled flyers. You can sometimes spot them skimming the surface of the ocean, following the waves up and down, never missing a beat.

This particular shot was pure luck. I was shooting some gulls hanging out on the beach, and noticed something going past behind me. Unfortunately I was in manual exposure mode (as almost always) and underexposed the shot but a good stop and a half. Thankfully I was able to bring the exposure back up when processing the raw file without introducing too much noise.

The gulls posed nicely for me, too.

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Cattle Egret

First outing with the new 50D and 400/5.6 -- a delightful combo!
This guy showed up while I was looking for good Ibis shots. I had no idea what it was at first other than that it looked like "some sort of Egret" -- a wildlife photographer helped identify it. Beautiful bird, and I was fortunate enough to have a decent looking sky behind it. (More)

Exposing manually for birds

Royal Tern, manual exposure, 1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 200, Canon 20D and 400/5.6

You'd think that when shooting wildlife in action you would want as much as possible automated, but exposure might not be one of those things.



When I recently started attempting bird in flight shots, I was shooting in Av mode. This consisted of pretty much moving the aperture between 5.6 and 11 depending on how much light I had, in order to keep the shutter speeds up. But, the results were frequently not particularly good. As fine a metering system the current cameras have, there isn't much that can be done in scenarios like small white bird against black background, or black bird against bright blue sky... one has to dial in exposure compensation back and forth constantly and hope that with experience it'll be "close enough" to save in post processing.


Often though, the exposure was just too far off and I ended up with noise in the dark areas or blown out highlights that even RAW files wouldn't retain. So I decided to try shooting in manual mode. What I found was that when shooting in relatively consistent light this was a far superior method as the background and subject and their relative brightness no longer was an issue; the amount of light falling on them did not change so why should the exposure? Indeed this was a lifesaver for me--I could shoot a Pelican in the water and two seconds later a Royal Tern against a white cloud and both would be exposed properly. In any other mode it would have required some experienced--and fast!--fiddling with exposure compensation to accomplish. Seemingly counter-intuitive, manual mode in this instance actually makes things EASIER.



Royal Tern, manual exposure, 1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 200, Canon 20D and 400/5.6

So what method do I use for setting the meter? Well, to be honest it's a fairly crude and basic one. I pick a scene that's in the light I want to meter for, change the ISO, shutter speed and aperture until I find an acceptable combination (for birds in flight I like to stay above 1/1000 shutter speeds) that the camera meter thinks is proper, then fire a shot and inspect the histogram. If the scene contains a good range of tones (some shadows, some bright highlights) and the histogram looks good (as far to the right as possible without blowing anything out -- turn "blinkies" on in your camera review mode to spot that) I'll use this exposure setting until the light changes. Sometimes I'll end up moving things around a bit and getting above or below the camera suggested exposure, mainly in a quest to get as much data in the RAW file as possible (see Expose Right at LL for why I do that.)



Mourning Dove, Av mode, 1/500, f/9, ISO 640, Canon 1Ds Mark II and 400/5.6 with 1.4X converter

Sometimes, though, when the light is rapidly changing, I'll go back to Av mode. This lets me react quickly to an opportunity, and will get me shots I wouldn't get when in Manual mode since I'd have to spend time fiddling with the exposure settings. In Av mode I generally leave it at zero exposure compensation and just dial some in where I gauge that it's needed. No scientific method behind what direction and how much; at this point it's pretty much based on experience.


Hopefully this helps explain why manual exposure can sometimes make life much easier!

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