Quote:
Originally Posted by spearo
Well done Dennis
Love the BIF series.
Were they freehand or off a tripod?
Can I ask what settings you used onthe BIF?
ISO/speed/ap etc
thanks
frank
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Hi Frank
Thanks for your words of appreciation!
This series were all free-hand. In terms of camera settings, as a starting point I began with the traditional “Sunny 16 Rule” which harks back to the days of film photography before through-the-lens metering (TTL) became popular.
It goes something like this. On a sunny day and with an ISO 100 film in the camera, you set the aperture to f/16 and the shutter speed equal to 1/100 (i.e. the reciprocal of the ISO rating of the film). The closest setting my 35mm film cameras had to 1/100 sec was 1/125 second so I generally used 1/125.
The constraints was that it had to be a sunny day and between say 10:00am and 2:00pm (brightest daylight), otherwise you would have to modify your exposure settings to take into account the different lighting encountered in the early morning, evening or when shooting in shadows.
This led me to base my (manual) setting for birds-in-flight at 1/1600 sec, ISO 400 and F5.6. If I left the camera in an auto-exposure mode (P, Tv, A), it would generally tend to expose for the bright background skies leaving the bird either severely underexposed or even rendering it as a silhouette.
I usually start at this setting and check the histogram and then adjust accordingly for dark birds against a bright sky or lighter toned birds against dark foliage etc. The Whistling Kite series were taken with the 300mm F4 and I used 1/2000 at F5.6 with ISO 400 on that particular day.
Cheers
Dennis
