Usually I don't like to shoot down on birds or wildlife, but in this case I was happy to capture this kind of angle so I could show how truly beautiful the colors of this bird are. It's a Ruppell's long-tailed starling from Kenya, and in the sun the iridescent colors are dazzling. The land rover I was in was crossing a rocky stream bed, and the bird was drinking about 12 feet from my camera. In situations like this, you have to shoot very fast because in a fraction of a section the bird can take flight and the moment is lost forever. That's why shooting in fully manual is a serious disadvantage -- it's just too slow. My settings for this were 1/3200, f/8, 3200 ISO, and I used a 400mm focal length with a 1.4x teleconverter on the Canon 7D Mark II giving me 896mm of focal length. The reason my shutter was so fast was because I was hoping for a flight shot. Even though the bird was close, I used the long lens to fill the frame with it. I don't like cropping my photos if I don't have to.
4 Comments
Aug 25, 2016, 5:42:29 PM
Jim - Hi Ian, I used neither mode. I used Program mode because this is biased to giving me the fastest shutter speed possible given the ISO setting and the light minus 1/3 f/stop.
Aug 25, 2016, 4:41:35 PM
Ian - Hi Jim,
So what camera mode did you use for this situation, Tv or Av ? Nice shot as usual.
Aug 25, 2016, 9:09:34 AM
Jim - Thanks, Janie. Yes, Margaret and everyone else had a fabulous time. We saw so many amazing things, and we had a wonderful group.
Aug 25, 2016, 5:15:59 AM
Janie Greene - Hey Jim,
What a gorgeous bird! Thank you for sharing!!! I talked to Margaret yesterday and she sounded like she had a wonderful time on your trip to Kenya. Janie G.