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| Food Time! 1/4000 sec |
Photography is such a diverse field that realistically, nobody can be an expert at it all. There are some key skills and circumstances that it's good to get experience of though, and one of my favourites is to practice shooting fast-moving objects such small birds. What shooting small birds gets you is experience pushing up your shutter speeds to freeze action, anticipating your subjects' movements and also it lets you know a whole lot about your equipment's capabilities. All this can be very useful later, especially if like me you're the sort of photographer who likes to quickly grab snatches of what he sees...
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| 1/1250 sec |
On this occasion, I was shooting with a legacy 80-200mm zoom lens of at least 30 years in age strapped to my OM-D. Manual focussing on quick little birds is not too easy - I was using the OM-D's zoom feature to focus on the area where I knew the birds would appear and trying not to move about too much (no tripod, as usual) and relying heavily on the OM-D's image stabiliser. I pushed the ISO up to 800 to make sure those shutter speeds stayed high. As you can see, I'm no birder, but I'm pretty happy with some of the shots I got, which I took at a local mere (that's a lake left over from the last ice age) from a handy bird-hide.
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| 1/800 sec |
When I was in my late 20s I used to hang out at a lot of animal behaviour conferences and really got fed up with listening to talks about birds, but actually the more I shoot them, the more I can see the attraction. I'm not going to be heading off into the jungles of Borneo looking for new species of finch any time soon, but from a photographic point of view I enjoyed the challenge.
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| 1/1250 sec |
When I got back home from the shoot, I could see some significant issues with the legacy lens that I managed to partly address in post-processing, the most distracting of which was some horrific blue/purple fringing on the edge of subjects. I also noted that the resolution and contrast of the lens didn't seem to be good enough for the sensor in the OM-D, but hey it's
really old glass, and in an emergency, it does get the photons on to the business end!
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| 1/2500 sec |
All this shutter-pushing has given me an idea for a fun new project meanwhile, more details coming soon but get ready to set your mode dial to Shutter Priority and start thinking about what you could do with it!!
2 comments:
I really like these! I've been photographing birds at my sunflower seed feeders, but I have to shoot through a big window. My ISO was too slow to capture a large woodpecker when it flew up from the ground, flashing the beautiful orange under it's wings and tail.
Glad you like them, I don't have a feeder at home, the cat would consider it an invitation to dinner!
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