Islands.

Adorama TV presents Exploring

Photography with Mark Wallace. Where you’ll learn

innovative techniques on shooting a wide-ranging of photography. Here's your host.

Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on

Adorama TV. It's brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has

everything for photographers. Well I'm gonna be spending the next couple of

weeks on the Galapagos Islands.

Today I’m on the Santa Cruz Island and I’m shooting some bird’s, taking pictures of

birds here.

I posted a few of the result's I got from a couple days ago on my Facebook page,

and I got a tone of questions.

So I want to explain how I got the results that I got. You can see here that

the birds that I shot previously

are really frozen and to achieve that what you need is a really

fast shutter speed but you also need to make sure that those birds are in focus.

So I wanna talk to you about those two things, freezing motion

and focusing. Now I wanna start by talking about the lens that I'm using.

This is a 70-200 mm, f/2.8 L

lens. It’s a really high end lens and the difference between a lens that has a

fixed

aperture of f/2.8 and a variable aperture that changes when you zoom in zoom out.

Is the focusing speed. This will focus anywhere from one and a half to two

times as fast

as a lower end lens. So I got a lot a question saying,

'hey this is a very very expensive lens can I get the same results

with a less expensive?’. You can get the same results but it’s going to be much

more difficult for you to focus

as quickly as this lens does. So don't beat me up about having such an

expensive lens, it really does

make a difference but you can get results that are similar using less

expensive lens. Maybe

a 70-300mm lens. Right so that's the

lens that I’m using. The camera here this is a 5D Mark III,

What I’ve done here is I have actually put this on aperture priority mode.

Now that sounds totally counter-intuitive because you're thinking, well you wanna

really super fast shutter speed.

Why aperture priority mode? Well i've put my aperture at 2.8. So my aperture is as

wide as it's going to go.

What that's going to do is force my shutter to be extremely fast

and so with the really bright sunlight right here, thats gonna keep my shutter

really really fast. So I don't have to worry about it.

Also because I have a 2.8 aperture that means that I'm going to have really

shallow depth of field,

and that's gonna isolate the bird as I'm shooting. Now the other thing I want to

do here is set my focus to

AI-Servo, on other cameras it’s called continuous

focus mode. What that does is instead of when I push my shutter release button

instead of locking on a subject and holding that.

It is always focusing. So as those birds are moving,

I'm gonna be tracking them and the focus is going to be tracking them

as well. Then the last thing I've done here, is I've put my cameras drive mode

into high-speed continuous. So when I push the shutter release you can hear it.

It's going to take a buncha pictures really really fast,

and that just improve my chances of getting a winning picture.

Now I'm not going to be using a tripod because things are gonna be moving

around.

So what I’ll do is I'll put my auto-focus point to the center

auto-focus point. That's the fastest, by the way, auto-focus point on your camera.

Then what I'll do is I will track the birds' just like I’m gonna

shoot them with the gun. That’s a horrible thing to say. But I'll track those birds

and then I'll be shooting as they fly and then

if I don't get a perfect a composition I can always crop in post-production to

make sure everything is right.

That's all there is to it. Use the best lens that you can possibly get,

preferrably a 2.8 fixed

aperture lens. I chose the 70-200mm. I shoot in aperture priority

mode at 2.8 or a wide aperture depending on how bright it is outside.

Make sure your focus is on continuous or AI-Servo. Then set your drive to

high-speed,

so you can get everything. So I’m gonna shoot a couple birds around here and I'll come

back to talk about one more thing before we go.

Well part of taking photos of birds is it's a waiting game and so i'm waiting for

some of these birds to fly by. You never know what you're gonna get. There is a

guy right there.

Nope he flew behind a tree and so, be patient when you're shooting any kind of

wildlife. You never know what they're gonna do, you have to sort of camp out

and when you see the shot be ready to take it. In fact here's a guy coming up

right here.

I'm gonna just track him. Perfect here he comes.

Ohh look at this guy, yeah.

That's how it works you have to make sure that your cameras always ready to go

because you never know what happens. So

I've got everything preset and as soon I see something

I can go ahead and shoot. So let’s keep going to see what kinda shots we get. I just

want to remind you that Adorama has some terrific contest’s. You can win great

prizes.

So click on the link and enter the contest today. Another tip about shooting

wildlife is just always be on your toes. I was shooting the birds

but we looked down and there was this lizard swimming around and climbing on

the ropes and eating some

stuff of this boat, and so I was able to shoot some extra bonus pictures,

and so that's something you might be looking for birds but then who knows?

Maybe an elk or something's gonna come out in the woods

if your North America. So make sure that you pay attention to other things around you

you don't wanna miss a great opportunity. I mentioned earlier that I didn't use a

tripod when I shooting the birds because I need a lot of mobility.

Well sometimes you need a little bit extra stability, specifically when your using

a lens that doesn't have image stabilisation, and this one does not.

So the thing I love about my travel angel, my Benro is that I can

convert it from

a tripod to a monopod. So what I’ll so here is I’ll just take this center column,

it comes right out.

Then this side leg here just comes right off,

and then what I can do is instead of using a normal tripod.

These two things here put together and now I've got myself

a nice monopod, and that will give me a lot of freedom of movement.

Plus it will give me the stability that I need to make sure that I don't have any

kind of vibrations

from my camera and so that’s something that you can do. If you're looking for a great

travel tripod,

this is the one that I use specifically because it’s lightweight

and you can do things like this. Well thanks for joining me today for

Exploring Photography, I hope that you learned a few things about shooting

things that move. In fact the stuff that we shot today, the birds,

it could be anything, it can be runners, it could be motorcycles, it could be

cyclist, it can be

anything that moves the principles all are the same.

You want to use a great lens, you want to make sure that your camera is set to

continuous or AI-Servo focus mode, a high speed drive,

and then to get that shallow depth-of-field open up your aperture

wide and that'll force your shuttler to go really, really fast and that's gonna

freeze motion. Thanks again for joining me today and don't forget that you can

subscribe to Adorama TV so you don't miss a single

episode. So do that right now and I'll see you next time.

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