This is a Lady Gouldian finch from Australia. I used a 500mm Canon f/4 telephoto plus a 2x teleconverter, giving me 1000mm of focal length. My shutter speed was 1/500th of a second, but in retrospect I should have used 1/1000th. The rule of thumb for shutter speeds with telephoto lenses is the shutter should be the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens. This insures a sharp picture. In this case, I did, in fact, produce a sharp image even though I handheld the camera, but I was lucky. A super long telephoto magnifies motion so much that a fast shutter is required to guarantee sharpness. My other settings were f/10 and 1000 ISO. Birds can flick there heads so fast that even with a reasonably fast shutter such as 1/1000th of a second, the picture will probably be blurred. Therefore, shoot perched birds for those very brief moments when the subject is motionless.
0 Comments