Special Problems of Wildlife Photography
The subject of wildlife photographs can not be asked to keep still and in fact, you have no control at all over them, otherwise, it’s not wildlife. So unless you are planning a shot or looking for some movement blurring you need to use a faster shutter speed and you need to be able to change settings and react quickly as the subject moves around unpredictably.
You will often have to use a longer lens than normal so will need faster shutter speeds and if that’s not possible a tripod. You should be able to handhold a lens when the shutter speed is the reciprocal of the length of the lens in mm ie for a 500mm you need a shutter speed faster than 1/500s to get sharp photos if you are good at holding a steady lens, Try it out by taking a series of shots at different shutter speeds ad comparing the sharpness.
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Animals tend to have surfaces that have very fine details, whether hairs or feathers which makes any lack of sharpness more evident.
What you can do that helps
Clean your camera and the lens carefully, set your lens aperture to its sweet spot where its sharpness is best set your ISO to the setting at which you can see no decrease in quality, and set your shutter speed to 1/1000 s (so long as you aren’t photographing a sprinting cheetah) and you are guaranteed really sharp photographs so long as the camera is still when you shoot and you have focussed the camera properly on a spot on the animal or its surroundings which are the same distance from the camera.
The sweet spot of the lens is the aperture at which the lens produces the sharpest photos. It’s normally 2 or 3 full stops smaller than the maximum aperture of the lens and can be measured quite easily. Place the camera on a tripod and set it with a 2-second timer on the shutter release. Take a series of photos of something with fine detail at low ISO and high shutter speed over a range of apertures. Study these photos and you will find an aperture or range of apertures where the image is sharper. This is the sweet spot.
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But the Exposure is Wrong
If you do this and don’t get the right exposure – let’s say it is not bright and your photos are underexposed – you have to adjust some or all of the f-stop, shutter speed & ISO to get the exposure right. In this case, where there is not enough entering the sensor camera, you increase the aperture or decrease the shutter speed to let more light in or increase the ISO to get more amplification of the signal out of the sensor. If you increase ISO you run the risk of grainy photographs and you can lose shadow detail. If you decrease the shutter speed you run the risk of motion or camera shake blurring. If you increase your aperture your depth of field will decrease meaning less of your photograph will be in focus and you might move off the sweet spot of the lens. It’s almost always a compromise if you are depending on natural light and you are outside. In a studio doing portraiture you “simply turn up the lights”.
This is just one scenario, but the same reasoning process, taking into account all settings and factors allows you to reach the setting which gives you the best result for the circumstances.