… a small tale about preparedness in photography
It wasn’t the little bird that irked me, it was my own failure to be well prepared. My friend David had invited me over to his place to photograph some birds. We hadn’t done that for a while, although it would be a cold and blustery January day, it seemed like a fine idea.
I set out to get ready. My camera, an old Nikon D800, needed updating of the year in the copyright setting and also in the comments field. That is something for every photographer to take care of. Next the battery was recharged.
The setting would be bare woods with a leaf-littered valley, the weather was to be overcast. My friend has many birdfeeders and some branches that the local songbirds visit frequently.
My approach for that shoot would be to set the camera exposure control to center-weighted to avoid some of the gray skylight from skewing the exposure. My lens would be my 70 to 300 mm zoom. Since birds are quick and skittish I set my camera to aperture-preferred and preset to f/5.6. That is full open at 300mm for that lens. The ISO setting was to 100 with auto-mode and with a shutter speed of no slower than 1/250. The actual ISO would likely go to 1600 to 3200 under the cloudy sky. Although that meant plenty of image noise, my post-processing would easily overcome that.
With gloves operating the controls is a bit slow, so auto-focus would be best. Since there would be many bare branches making sure that the camera sees the bird to focus on, I set it to use a single focus point and preset that to the center of the field. I made sure the lens was set to auto-focus. It would be hand-held shooting since the subjects would be all over the place, so that called for vibration reduction to help my shaking hands.
Other settings would remain the way I have been shooting other subjects.
So on to the shoot. David served a nice cup of hot chocolate and then we settled on the deck to watch and photograph the frequent visitors.
A little pine warbler was the first customer. It hopped around on the log just ten feet in front of me. My first test shot was aggravating.
The camera did not focus!
Arrgghh!!
There is a switch on the camera body that I had neglected to set to AF. All that careful “make-ready” and I still missed one setting.
Maybe next time a checklist would be helpful.
The little bird was still hopping around. What next? Focusing worked but the next shot wasn’t a keeper either.
It wasn’t the focus this time, it was motion blur. I moved the camera too fast, as you can see from unsharp log. But the bird was even faster in hopping about. Clearly 1/250 second was not fast enough.
On this dark day the ISO was already at 2500 which made a faster shutter speed, and the needed higher ISO, not possible.
I would just have to wait for the birds to hold still.
Close, but no cigar. Those busy little critters sit still for only a second or two. Oh, and there it goes over to the suet feeder.
At least it held still on the feeder. But not for long and off it goes to a nearby branch.
No, not again. When shooting with a single point focus, you really need to get that little box in the viewfinder right on the subject, and not on the tree in the background.
Try again.
The image above is a crop, as is the photo at the top of this little story.
That branch, and the little bird, were actually some 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) away. With just a 300mm lens setting that made the bird just a small patch, some 1000 pixels across, in the actual image. Cropping, noise reduction, and a tad of sharpening made it acceptable for the blog post here. For display on a wall maybe not so much.
You can see some of the EXIF data above. the depth of field was some 200mm, about 8 inches. The light value was 8.6 – it was a darkish day. Maybe we can chat about that another time.
.:. © 2025 Ludwig Keck