All feedback welcomed. First time shooting with a DSLR, and using jpg. Just found out about Raw. Quick moving warbler, I clipped a bit of the extra background to focus on the bird. shot using the P-setting on a Nikon D3500. Looking for suggestions on using the manual setting for wildlife shots like this. Hiking through natural habitat, with birds moving fast from low to high in the trees. Thanks
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Maybe re-post the image…I viewed it by clicking blue bird name.
What lens are you using?
“birds moving fast from low to high in the trees” are they flying away from you?
Using a 70-300 zoom. Warblers are generally found in the mid-to upper portions of tree canopies. They move fast along the limbs, from tree to tree and at this time of the year are difficult to focus on even with just binoculars.
Use auto (spot setting) focus. The camera will do it better and faster than you and let you think about other things during the exposure (composition, body position, head tilt, etc).
Correct exposure is always very difficult because most birds contain both black and white feathers (difficult colors for any light meter to read correctly). Shooting on a bright sunny day will increase the exposure problem. Shooting when the light is diffused, (when the extremes of bright and dark are less), will produce a more accurate light meter reading, and a less contrasty, easier in the eyes to image to look at.
If your hand holding the camera, it’s all about the approach. I move slowly, never have eye contact (it tells them they have lost personal safety). I use peripheral vision for the approach and only look at them in the viewfinder.
Working with birds, I think it helps to understand that any bird can see and hear far better than you. Birds are more aware of what’s going on around you, than you will ever be. You are dealing with superior beings and need to act accordingly. Discovering respect for them and how to convey it is a powerful tool.
TY for Post
Welcome to NPN, Mike. I think you’ll find this a great place to learn. Getting any kind of shot of warblers is an achievement and you manged to catch this one in the clear. As you noted,shooting in Raw helps as it’s a bit more forgiving. Shooting into trees as you’re walking around is a very difficult task (at least for me). You don’t mention the lens you’re using and that’s probably more important than the camera. For small birds an equivalent 35 mm focal length of at lest 500 mm is going to be necessary and 700-800 is preferable. Since the D3500 is a crop sensor camera, that means a focal length of 400-600 mm for your lens. Any shorter than that and you’re going to be doing a lot of cropping, which means the original has to be utterly perfect to hold up.
If you can’t afford a longer lens right away, the best way I’ve found is to sit still and let the critters come to you. When I first joined this forum, there was a woman who did all her bird photography with a 200 mm lens and did it superbly. She never admitted it, but I’m sure she just was good at sitting still and letting the birds come to her.
Exposure settings are difficult and there are lot’s of opinions. most of us started out shooting in “aperture priority” mode and using exposure compensation to balance the bird with the background. It takes a fair bit of practice to get the hang of the compensation, but it’s fairly quick and works pretty well. While I shoot mostly in full manual mode these days, I still revert to it in really rapidly changing conditions.
The other trick to shooting small birds in the woods is to use the smallest Autofocus area your camera supports. I’m not sure how Nikon does it, but Canon has a “single point” and then an even smaller area within that and that’s what I’ll use in the kind of conditions you were in here. In more forgiving conditions I’ll use a small group of a center point and the immediately surrounding points and shooting against an open sky, I’ll go to an even larger area (mainly because my aim is lousy).
I hope that gives you some idea of where to start.
Thanks everyone for the help and suggestions. While I’m a long time birder, i am new to photography. I am using aperture priority and trying several settings while shooting. My zoom is the standard 70-300, but I am thinking of getting either the 1.7or 2.0 converter.
Mike: You didn’t list the rest of the specs for you 70-300, but I’m going to bet that a 1.7 or 2.0 converter may not even fit. Converters have an element that goes quite a ways into the back of the lens it is being mated to. You will also most likely not have autofocus with a converter even if the converter could be mounted to your lens. Converters are generally designed for faster (f/4 or faster) primes or higher end zooms that are pretty fast on the long end. Just be careful buying something like that for a standard 70-300 lens. I don’t think it will work.
