gdanmitchell wrote:
To reassure you a bit, if you are photographing birds in flight with long lenses... \"keeper rates\" are normally quite low. :-)
I know Dan, though judging by what i have seen on this guys LCD when zooming in i can tell that advanced tracking AF and high FPS, helps
There is no question that relatively responsive equipment, especially lenses and AF system, can help for this kind of photography. Yet...
1. Even with the best wildlife-adapted gear (big large aperture prime, fast camera, burst mode, great AF system), there is a very high percentage of not-great images.
2. The contribution of technique to success is much greater than most folks realize. Getting much better at this stuff has made a much bigger contribution to my success than any piece of gear I own. Again, not saying that gear doesn\'t matter — but I am saying that other things matter a lot.
My own progression might illustrate this a bit. I recall that when I first became interested in photographing migratory birds in flight the steps went sort of like this:
1. It was a major challenge just spotting the birds in time to raise the camera and try to find them... and finding them with a big lens was a challenge.
2. Eventually I got to where I could get the bird into the frame a bit more often, but when I tried to track the critter in flight it \"fell out of the frame\" all too quickly.
3. Eventually I began to smooth out my tracking ability, but then discovered that I was \"glitching\" when pressing the shutter — interrupting the smooth panning motion necessary to track.
4. Once I figured that out I could go beyond just trying to keep the darned critter in the frame and pan effectively without bouncing the camera with my excited shutter button pressing. Now I could start to be aware of where the AF point(s) fell on the target.
5. Eventually I was able to do all of this while continuing to actually \"see\" the bird, and rather than just banging away in burst mode I could begin to time exposures for best instants.
6. Past that point I began to be aware enough of what was in the frame that I was no longer just seeing the bird, but I was also able to instantaneously see and evaluate the background and think about when to exposure (while panning, keeping the bird under the AF point, monitoring the bird itself) the image in the context of having a composition that included conscious decisions about the background elements.
7. Eventually I found, on good days, that lifting the camera to photograph such things put me not in a sort of frantic state, but instead in a very calm state, where lifting the camera and \"firing\" the shutter could be a smooth and quiet operation.
And I still get much lower keeper rates than with landscape, etc. photography — perhaps roughly on par with street photography!
YMMV,
Dan
Aug 16, 2015 at 11:15 AM
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