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Please give us a photography tip. It could be about your camera or equipment or settings, a favorite location or location type, a subject, etc. but it's something you learned by doing it/using it/being in the same setting. Don't worry about it being simple, some of us want to try different things and don't know where to start.
I'll start with a flying bird photography tip: Practice with inland seagulls (and great blue herons).
I took bird photos for years but my flying bird shots were terrible until I got experience taking photos of seagulls. I live inland (Tennessee) but the lake in town gets migratory ring-billed gulls. They arrive after Thanksgiving and before December 10 and leave around the first week of March. I usually only go out on semi-cloudy or cloudy days because these seagulls have such a long wingspan, they cast a shadow across their own white bodies. They tend not to fly much when it is very cold or very windy.
You can tell a juvenile ring-billed gull from an adult as the adults have a yellow beak, yellow legs and yellow eyes and are primarily grey, white and black. The juveniles have a pink beak, pink legs and blackish eyes. The also have brown splashed all over them which you don't see on the adults.
Because they are only at my lake in the winter, the opposite shore tends to be an ugly background. You may be luckier but at least at a lake, the odds are good that you can have a background in addition to sky.
The lake, as opposed to an ocean, is that the seagulls tend to fly toward the shore/the trees/the light poles/the docks from swimming in the water so you can easily get a photo of them coming at you. Also, moving cars arriving, dogs being walked, kids banging around tend to make them take off from the shore en masse.
But the best thing about them, in my opinion, is just like Great Blue Herons, they fly slower than other birds and often glide slowly and drop down into their landing spot. It's fairly easy to follow them in flight and photograph them dropping down to their landing spot.
I use a 55 - 300mm Nikon lens and a D7200 camera, both of which are now obsolete. This year, I will try a D7500 with a 70 - 300mm lens (although I am not a fan of the D7500). The Manual camera settings I start off with are F11, 1250 shutter speed and auto ISO and adjust from there if needed. There are probably better camera equipment choices but I'm old and weight of lens and camera contributes to my choice of equipment for handheld tracking of flying birds.
These flying seagull photos were all taken at my lake on different days in different years:
One thing I want to add is the higher end cameras have a focus tracking setting ..that settings decides how long to focus on the subject if say a tree gets in the way before refocusing.
I find longer settings before shifting focus work better.
Another thing is that the focus system will shift focus off the bird body when the wings come down horizontally .
The edge of the wings when flat in flight will pull focus off the body ..however the longer delay on focus tracking prevents it from refocusing quickly
For those who question why we use manual camera settings ?
It is because birds in flight need a high rate of speed , they also need good depth of field …
By setting the camera to manual you can lock in your settings and let auto iso control exposure .
We do the same for street photography but with different settings .
But auto iso is what is controlling exposure
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-02-2022 at 02:22 PM..
We do the same for birding …manual , 1/1250 , auto iso with a min of 640 iso for our Nikon 200-500mm with z6 cameras .
Lens opening is about f8 or so …
I do use back button focus though so if I move off the subject a bit it does not refocus .
I don’t watch the high iso like I used to since topaz denoise does an amazing job
You were right about the Z6 being super sharp but the Nikon 200 - 500mm lens is too heavy for me to track flying birds. It's fine for stationary birds but I also have trouble finding the bird in flight even with the 500mm 5.6 prime which is not as big of a weight problem. That lens is lighter than the 200 - 500mm. I also have a D500 but I still swear by my old D7200 for flying birds with a 55-300 mm lens and some cropping to make the bird larger. I'm thinking it has more to do with what I'm used to than the equipment.
Took the Z6 with me on my last wildlife refuge 2 week trip. Should have practiced with it more before I went away. My keepers for flying birds were all with my D7200 and the smaller 55 - 300mm lens but the bird photos I entered in contests were the stationary shots with the Z6 and 500mm 5.6 prime because you just can't beat the sharpness.
When you are photographing something that has power lines/poles,
or other distracting feature, try and position them where they can be
edited out easier. I have seen too many sunset/sunrise pics or pics in
general ruined by power lines. All they had to do was take a few steps
backwards, to the side, etc to miss them. I rarely post pics with power
lines/poles in them because I hate what it does to a pic. Here are a couple
of before and after shots I did. In this one there was no way to position
the lines or myself to make editing easier, I just dealt with it...
When you are photographing something that has power lines/poles,
or other distracting feature, try and position them where they can be
edited out easier. I have seen too many sunset/sunrise pics or pics in
general ruined by power lines. All they had to do was take a few steps
backwards, to the side, etc to miss them. I rarely post pics with power
lines/poles in them because I hate what it does to a pic. Here are a couple
of before and after shots I did. In this one there was no way to position
the lines or myself to make editing easier, I just dealt with it...
Wow! Nice photo and good tip. At least you expect to see power lines in a train yard (not sure of the right terminology). Imagine a cow in a pasture with power lines behind it or my favorite, a French and Indian War or a US Civil War re-enactment with power lines in the background. That's when I clone more leaves on the trees or remove object.
LAURA , you made me pull out the old camera today.
it turns out it is the older d7000 not the d7200.
it has been years since we retired it for the z6
So we took it to the park today and it still works well
used with the nikon 200-500mm .
A lot harder to set exposure since it isn’t real time , had to watch iso since high iso can get really noisy .
But not bad for such an old camera .
All shot in manual
Last edited by mathjak107; 12-06-2022 at 12:36 PM..
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