Blue tit and Wren

[Bub-les]

Today the sun came out and so did the birds. I found these two in my garden. Hopefully you'll think that there's a little improvement on my last attempts




Would any of them be good enough for the Gallery?

[willing to learn]

Well done on the wren they seem rarely to break cover, and when they do they hardly pause for breath.
Regards
Colin

[Geoff F]

You seem to be getting in the right places and the framing is good; but they do seem a little bit soft to me. Possibly your shutter speed is a touch slow or, if you are using autofocus, it is focusing on the background not the bird's faces, which is a common problem.

[Ollie]

Can't see much wrong with the focus on the Blue Tits, but the Wrens are a touch soft, possibly down to too much haste in trying to get the shot as they are very fast little birds or probably as Geoff says the camera has auto focussed on the background sooner than the bird

Very good efforts though.
Roger

[glsammy]

On your top blue tit I think your camera was set incorrectly. Your shutter speed was only 1/50sec, with an aperture of F25. It was taken in Manual mode. Whilst manual mode is very handy at times, it makes learning very difficult!
1/50sec is too slow to get reliable focus, especially at a focal length of 460mm!
Ideally you should try and get you shutter speed around the 1/500sec. This would have increased the aperture to a much lower number. In your case you F25 could have been changed to F8, which would have given you a shutter speed of around 1/400sec..(I could be slightly or even massively out on this!)

All of this assumes you weren't using a tripod of course! if you were, it's still best to get a faster shutter speed so as to freeze any possible movement of the bird.

I suggest you try AV mode. In this you set the aperture and the camera will adjust the shutter speed accordingly.

One other point, the white on the bird looks slightly blown. That means there's no real detail in there, it looks just like a large patch of pure white. One way to deal with this is to dial in some negative exposure compensation when taking any shots of anything with white in them, especially on a bright sunny day. Doing this increases the shutter speed when using AV mode.

[Bub-les]

Thanks for the advice and the encouragement. I have been having trouble focusing using the af and have tried using manual focus. I must admit I'm not happy with that either. With the af I was finding the camera was focusing more on the background and often missed the bird all together! This is in spite of me setting it to center focus and using the af lock. I've tried using the continuous focus but I can't seem to handle that any better. I've been guilty of trying too hard and set the camera on auto to let me concentrate on focusing! Wrong move I see that now I should have set it on AV.
Am I right in thinking the camera's af system works better in good light?
Barbara

[Ollie]

Hi Barbara. AV mode and auto focus are the best way to go for bird photography.

It's more to do with the lens that decides how well the AF works than the camera, but yes good light will help
Roger

[Mr Mag00]

nice shots and some nice advice which i have taken too, lol!

[Geoff F]

Sometimes I prefer Tv to Av, when I need a fast shutter speed for a moving bird or to avoid camera shake and I am prepared to lose depth of field. I don't think there is one rule for all occasions, except avoid the full auto setting. Manual focus is ideal, but only if you can achieve sharp focus quickly enough; I struggle and keep twiddling with the adjustment while trying to keep a moving target in focus.

Autofocus is so much easier as long as you are certain that you are getting spot on target. A small brown bird in the undergrowth on a dull day confuses the autofocus which is struggling to automatically decide what you want it to do. Too often it will focus on a sharp edged twig instead of the soft edged bird. Normally, I start off with autofocus but switch to manual if I can see potential problems ahead.