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Hi Robert
Thanks!
I’ve been experimenting with a few techniques and only used the low speed continuous shooting drive mode for the dolphins as their position was reasonably predictable.
For the birds in flight, I use single shot exposure with manual metering and have found that I can use the Canon L lenses wide open, so that gives me a higher shutter speed to freeze the movement. Typically I’m shooting at 1/1000 to 1/1600 sec at ISO400. This prevents the underbelly of the bird from being underexposed, although the bright sky background is usually over exposed by a stop or two.
I have tried “predictive focusing” where I focus on a point where I think the bird is going to be and then squeeze the shutter just before it gets there, but I have had a lot of failures – I can’t seem to time the lag as well as I used to with my film SLR’s.
So, I change the auto focus mode to AI Servo and select the centre focus point and then try to follow the bird. I still get a lot of failures but have found the success rate at around 30-50%. Even out of those, usually only 1 or 2 are keepers.
Another trick is to set the mode to Aperture Priority and with an L lens, leave it wide open so that the camera then selects fast shutter speeds. The challenge here is to spot meter on the moving bird. The danger is that if you miss the bird and meter off the sky, the bird becomes under exposed as the meter is fooled by the bright sky. Also, if the bird has large areas of white feathers, that can give a false meter reading too.
It’s a steep learning curve but also a lot of fun. So much less tiring that an all nighter!
Cheers
Dennis
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