Sharpness and Exposure in Bird Photography
Getting Sharper Pictures
When you first start you will find it difficult to get sharp well-exposed pictures of your subject and you might find this frustrating, but don't worry with a bit of practice and thought, your photography will soon improve. You can check for sharpness as soon as you have taken the photo. All you need to do is find a shaded area so that you can see your LCD screen clearly and zoom right in to the maximum level. If the image isn't sharp you will need to check to see if this was something to do with camera shake, subject movement or focusing.
If everything is blurred in one direction then it will be camera movement, and there are a few things you can do to improve your image. You can practice your 'long lens technique' by holding the lens underneath and tucking your elbow in for support and also make sure you use a gentle shutter action. You can also use a tripod, monopod (which is mainly a tripod with one leg), beanbag or anything else to steady your camera, for example there may be a fence, or side of a tree, as long as it can steady the camera you can use it. The other thing that you can do is use a maximum aperture so that you can increase your shutter speed to freeze the movement. you may need to use a higher ISO setting to get the best shutter speed but this can lead to noise. We will talk about ISO and aperture settings in a later post.
If only the bird is blurred this could be one of two things. It could be a focusing problem or it could be a problem with the bird moving. You can tell the difference between these two problems quite easily. If it's a focusing problem the bird will be just blurred and you can correct this by re-focusing on the bird itself. On the movement problem this is also easy to tell as you will be able to see directional blur on the bird but everything else will be sharp. You can correct this by waiting for the bird to be still and taking the photograph again.
Getting The Exposure Right
If your camera can display a histogram of your images you can check this to improve your exposure. If your histogram is showing too much on the left and clipping the edge of the left-hand side then your image is under-exposed and you will need to use your exposure compensation to correct this. On the other hand if your histogram is showing too much on the right and clipping the edge of the right-hand side then you image is over-exposed and you will need to use your exposure compensation to under-expose a little to correct this. I must point out though that this is not always the case for example if you took a photo of a black cat in a tunnel then your histogram is going to show to the far left and if you took a photo of a white cat in a snowy background then the histogram will show to the far right. But as a basic rule of thumb this will help with most of your images.
If you would like to know more about the histogram then have a look at this website http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/histograms.htm as he explains it really well but for now all you need to do is to keep your histogram from clipping the edges too much.
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