Critique my first attempts at wildlife photography!

Cafe Society
21

I agree with Banquet Bear that you should learn about aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. Do you know how aperture affects depth of field, and what shutter speeds are necessary to freeze action? For example, the bobcat picture looks like you didn’t stop down enough, and the quail picture looks like your shutter speed was too slow (that is, unless you wanted the tail to be blurred).

At first I thought the crow picture was underexposed - that the details in the bird’s feathers were blocked in. But I grabbed a copy of the picture and played with it in Photoshop, and there are actually details in all that black. In general, though, it’s a good idea to learn how much contrast your camera can capture and work within those limits. I’d suggest learning to use your camera’s histogram function (assuming it has one) - it can tell you whether you’re likely to lose detail in the dark and light areas of the picture.

As for fill flash - it can be useful, but in nature photography you often aren’t close enough to the subject for it to do much good.

I think you cropped the first eagle picture too much on top. You need to have some space above the tips of the feathers.

You cropped the picture of the shore bird differently than I would have done it. You took out most of the sand and left the breakers in the background. I’d have cropped out the breakers and left a lot more of the sand. The waves in the background act as a distraction from the subject. Also, in cropping out the sand you left a strip on the bottom. There isn’t enough of it there to tell the viewer what it is - I would either leave more of it in or take all of it out.

22

Just a couple quick bits of advice:

  1. Forget Photoshop; look into Adobe Lightroom (even an older version).

  2. Find a way to get a hold of this book.

  3. Get yourself out of automatic mode ASAP (assuming that what you used). Learn about aperture priority and shutter priority modes.

  4. Forget about flash (with nature photography)

  5. Learn about composition.

  6. Practice!
    mmm

23

Just wanted to repeat this so it doesn’t get lost in all the good technical advice. I used to do a good bit of underwater photography. I have some pretty cool shots..mostly because I took a ton of pictures. I’m too lazy to think through all the settings, but I know a few general concepts. So I’d take five or six shots with varying settings, and then look at them when I got to the surface.

So take lots of pictures..and experiment with various settings. Look at the results and see what changes do to the final product.

-D/a

24

araminty, you had excellent fortune seeing so many animals, and for a first shoot your results are splendid. I greatly prefer the uncropped image of the flying eagle (versus the cropped version). The strength of the picture is the diagonal eagle tying in with the pretty bare branches – by itself the bird is nothing special. It usually takes long hours of planning and waiting to get detailed shots in lovely light of animals doing something extraordinary, but as a composition your photo is nice.

Also a nice composition is the rock and pelicans, and -again- the uncropped picture is superior. It only works as a symmetrical image, and the extra space around the island enhances the mood. If it was my shot I’d take out the left hand bird to increase the symmetry (purity be damned).

I also like the symmetrical balance of the deer shot. The textures and lavender colors are charming. It needs “photoshopping” to really pop those virtues, but it has potential.

Nice work.

25

I also like the symmetry of the Pelicans & sea stack photo. Very nice. :slight_smile:

I dabble in wildlife photography a little too, with a camera similar to the one you’re using. Are you using a polarizing filter? That can help a great deal with the color in these shots (but not the pelican one - that’s best in silhouettes anyway.)

The advice upthread about using the earliest and latest light in the day is also good. For wildlife photos, flash is not frequently useful, so you have to make do with what light you have, and on the Sonoma coast, you’re about to get some rain moving through this weekend (the 5th/6th of Jan. as I write this.) The mornings & afternoons after that rain front move through will have a high probability of being wonderfully clear with good light for taking more photos, so get out there for sure!

The lens you’re using is a good starter, but eventually for wildlife you’ll want to move up to a larger lens - 300 or 400 mm if you won’t be using a tripod (e.g. tracking birds in flight like your Northern Harrier pictures) or larger if you will be using a tripod.

26

Sorry. I was thinking of this one.

I strongly agree with whoever mentioned getting out of auto mode. If the OP is not familiar with shooting in manual, take a class on using a digital SLR. You can do a lot to compensate for the type of light you are shooting in, and the subject.

Thanks for fixing that horizon; it was making me slightly nauseous. :wink:

27

I loves me some California Quail.

'tis a shame that you blurred out the genitals one, bowing to the censors so easily!:smiley:
As you learn a bit more about exposure in your reading and practice, you’ll find that time and aperture are, if not mortal enemies of one another, at least spirited adversaries.

The only cure for this of course, is faster glass. Dawn and dusk are great times for photographing nature, but unless you carry a tripod and make all your subjects sit still, a lens with a larger aperture is your friend.

I know I’m just spending your money, but good glass is forever. Look around for a nice used 2.8 zoom and keep practicing.

28

Even with IS lenses, a monopod (or even a tripod, if subjects allow) is often a welcome support. Too shallow focus, subject motion blur, camera motion blur can all add up to an image that just isn’t sharp enough. (Sometimes, any one of those things might be used to artistic advantage. Try out several ways)

Shooting in RAW will let you enhance exposure, contrast, and color values more than a jpeg file, provided you have the right image processing program. ACDSee, PhotoShop Elements, Light Room are a few that come to mind. Lots of them out there. Check reviews to narrow it down to one you will want to have and use.

You are on the right track. Please don’t give up, as you have a good sense of what may be of interest. Whenever you can, look for a different vantage point after you take your first pics. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, other times, you might find a very special image.

Play with your camera. It’s not like you’re burning $$$ of film. Change settings, try different modes, get used to your camera’s controls.

A book like this (for your particular camera, of course) is a good idea. The manuals that come with many cameras today leave something to be desired.

Carl Shipman’s Understanding Photography is still a worthy addition to a beginner’s bookshelf. Sure, it’s from the 80s, but the principles still fit for digital (mostly).

29

Hey, if you find yourself on a wildlife shooting trip again, one nice thing to do is rent better lenses for the trip. They’re surprisingly affordable, especially compared with the full price of a lens, and against whatever it cost you in travel and lodgings to get to where you could photograph those critters. Think what you could have done shooting with something like this, or this. That latter lens goes new for about seven thousand freaking dollars, and I bet it’s a blast to shoot with.

30

I like the composition on the same three shots that Baal chose. You’ve framed the subject well in each of those (with the branches for the eagle, the rocks for the pelicans, and the circle of bushes for the deer). The first two could have been improved with better light and exposure, but they’re still good.

As others have said, you’re limited by your lens. You can certainly get excellent results with it, provided you learn its strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that you can practice your focusing and exposure anywhere - take shots of pigeons in your back yard or apples on your kitchen bench, download them immediately and study the results. Take photos with different exposures and look at the differences side by side. Practice focusing on moving targets.

One thing that might help is to crank up your ISO. Most photographers will cringe at the idea of adding noise, but the slow shutter speed is having a much bigger effect on your photos than a higher ISO will. (I’ve had probably tens of thousands of shots spoiled by a shutter speed that was too low, but probably only a few dozen ruined by too much noise). Try not to strip out the EXIF data from your photos when you post them online - you’ll get better tips if photographers can see the settings you used.

Your camera probably came with some basic software that will let you see the exposure settings for each photo, and make basic adjustments like saturation and contrast. That’s fine for now. Save your money for better glass. (A 50mm f1.8 lens is cheap and the best money you’ll ever spend on camera gear).

You might find some of Thom Hogan’s articles helpful - he’s a wildlife photographer who writes well. His gear articles are mostly about Nikon but the technique and general articles (left sidebar, scroll down) might be of some use. Find other photographers you like, study their work, and make a note of what you like about each photograph.

31

Thanks again, everyone. I can see I have a lot to learn. I am pretty happy with the neat things we saw - I’m from Australia, and have been in the US around 6 years, so even the “common” animals are exciting to me, specially since I’m a zoologist. I’m looking into the books recommended, and trying some trial versions of editing software.

Oh, and the eagles were right in the mouth of the Russian River, by the town of Jenner. Nice spot!

32

A housekeeping note (that you’ve probably figured out yourself already) - when you alter/edit your photographs, keep the originals in case you want to go back to them if the editing doesn’t work out well.

I had to go back and look at the “blurred genitals” - you’re a troublemaker, aren’t you, ducati? :smiley:

33

+1. I love my 50, and you can get one for around $100. If you hate flash and want to shoot indoors, this lens is a huge win. For wildlife, not so much, but it definitely deserves a spot in your gear bag. There’s no reason not to own one. And you’ll definitely know what someone means by “fast lens”.

34

They’d benefit a lot from small tweaks to contrast, exposure, and saturation. You definitely want to shoot raw (shooting jpeg out of a dslr is crazy to me, you lose so much flexibility) and Lightroom is really good for the sort of basic corrections you’ll probably want to make.

You’ll need to learn your autofocus system. Nature often moves too fast for effective manual focus unless you’re really good (and you have good eyes and even then I’m not sure how well you can manually focus on pentamirror cameras), but you can still leave less up to the camera by using center point only for autofocus and then recompose.

RAW will also give you some more flexibility to raise the iso to make the shutter speed faster. Even if you’ve got steady hands, animals can make sudden movements that’ll ruin slow shutter speed shots - I’ve missed a few great shots by trying to go low iso/slow shutter for maximum detail only to have it ruined by sudden animal movement.

Being closer to the subject, especially with a telephoto lens, can increase the seperation of foreground and background which can create a dramatic effect, like this for example. Had I taken that picture 10 feet back further than I was, it would’ve been a fairly uninteresting picture. (You might say I was too extreme in that picture, that the depth of field is too narrow, but I like the feel it results in). Granted, that’s not always practical with easily spookable animals, and 200mm still puts a limit on it. But the closer you can get to your subject and the further back any background objects are from it the more seperation you can get.

This one isn’t as dramatic, since I was further away, but isolating your subject and making them stick out from the background can still be effective.

I tend to be a contrast junkie though, some people might think my pictures tend to be overcontrasted and oversaturated, but I just do what looks most pleasing to me.

35

I hate you. The only photo I have of a bobcat is through bars at the SF zoo :slight_smile: ( and I count myself lucky to have seen him even then - little bugger is usually hiding ). Only one I have seen in the wild was for five seconds crossing a road in the dead of night in the Mojave. They’re usually extraordinarily wary, even where common. If you have a picture of a ring-tailed cat as well I may have to hunt you down and speak severely to you ;).

36

I’m sorry! I am aware that a daylight, 10 minute sighting of a wild bobcat is pretty awesome :slight_smile: I was rather referring to the deer and quail as “common,” such an ugly term. No, I’ve never seen a ring-tail in the wild, but would dearly love to. I’m also on the lookout for a wild beaver – up in the Sierras last year, we saw a dam, nibble marks on the trees, tracks through the grass… waited two hours, and no sign of the occupants!

The Palo Alto Jr. Museum and Zoo has a really lovely bobcat exhibit. Curioddysey in San Mateo (Coyote Point Museum as was) has an old fat bobcat, and has previously exhibited ring-tails. Oakland Zoo has a new coati exhibit, if procyonids are your bent.

37

There are wild beavers living in Alhambra Creek in Martinez, which is closer to you than the Sierra Nevada.

38

If you want to see native wildlife you could visit Sutro Sam, the river otter who’s taken up residence at the old Sutro Baths in San Francisco.

39

I’m only gonna comment on 3, the pelicans, the bobcat, and the eagles.

The peligans is a nice shot. A split second later so they were right over the rock would’ve been a little better, tricky though. Mostly, besides leveling, it could use brightening and some contrast enhancement of the rock. Easily done in post. Forget the recommendation to forget photoshop, and get Photoshop Elements. For about 75$ it’s a very useful program, it’ll take you a couple of years to exhuast that esp. combined with Lightroom (if you’re shooting RAW)

The bobcat is a nice shot except for focus. Your camera locked in front of the critter, a common enough problem with auto focus. It’s good, but it doesn’t know what the subject is supposed to be. Learn your camera, you should be able to choose a smaller focus square, and it will usually tell you what it’s focused on. If you look at the very bottom of that shot you’ll see blur, which becomes sharp in the grass, then blurred again. That’s called depth of field and it works both for and against us as photographers, esp with wildlife, as telephoto lenses don’t always have enough, and critters won’t pose.

The eagles could use some leveling, and some contrast and sharpening of the birds, but the biggest problem there is the line in the backround where the green turns to brown, it’s distracting and takes your eye away from the subject. Ways to solve that are repositioning yourself, or using a shallower depth of field to throw the backround out of focus.

Don’t sweat the leveling too much, you can’t always take time for a tripod in wildlife photos, a quick draw, and spray and pray approach is common among professionals, I level a lot of photos in post. With your permission, I’ll download a couple of these and tweak them to show you what I mean.

None of this is meant to be critical, those are some good shots, keep up the good work.

40

That’s the important thing. You’re happy; you got to spend a day outdoors; you met one friend who knows about cameras, and you’ve met some more here on The Straight Dope. Result!

On an amateur level photographs exist to drive conversation and build relationships. They aren’t really supposed to be evaluated as images. There’s an unspoken covenant - just as there is in the worlds of local theatre or bowling. “Yeah, they’re not very good. Yours aren’t very good either. If you were any good, you wouldn’t be here. Let’s not rock the boat”. So, yes, your photos are very nice. Could you improve them with Photoshop? A little bit. It would be better to take them again, which will give you another opportunity to go out. Take pictures, wait, look at them later on. Which ones look nice? Copy them, but try to evolve. That’s easy. The rest of it is hard and time-consuming.

Still, tips. Marketing. I suggest you get an Instagram account - the brand is tarnished but it’s still hip - and plug your pictures on Facebook and also to your friends. Your friends will quickly come to know you as The Wildlife Photography Lady. They can be of use to you. Cultivate them.

Decide on the market you’re going to target; families or men? If the former, emphasise the fact that you’re happily married. Have kids ASAP and use them ruthlessly, like the chaps who run The-Digital-Picture, Steve Huff Photography, and The Imaging Resource. Intersperse your wildlife shots with pictures of your kids. Document their every waking moment and put the pictures up on the internet. They will be useful to you. Think of it as repayment for meals and a house.

Assuming you don’t just want to photograph birds in the garden - a perfectly viable option, Flickr has no shortage of people who never leave their back garden - then wildlife photography is hard. It’s one of those few fields of photography you can’t easily fake. There are no cheap shortcuts for long and fast, no easy way of getting yourself within shooting distance of rare birds etc without actually going there.

Assuming money is an object I would suggest you keep the camera (but avoid rainy days and keep it in a bag when you cross mud) and get a 400mm f/5.6L on the used market with a 1.4x teleconverter. That gives you plenty of reach. Hefty tripod. Go out towards the end of the day or at the very beginning. Your life from now on will be a mixture of physically demanding equipment-lugging followed by tedious waiting in the cold whilst sitting in a hide drinking coffee from a flask. It’s a job now. Not fun; arduous, unpleasant, the rewards are slight. Men do it because they want to beat other men or conquer nature, they’re genetically programmed to do so.

On a less extreme level the classic reasonable Canon safari lens in the 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6. I can’t emphasise enough how much amateur photography is about conversation and building relationships. Composition and artfulness are nebulous things that you can’t really talk about. You can however talk about how you liked the 100-400mm’s image stabiliser. At great length. On an amateur level, the gear is everything.

Like most things, wildlife photography is easy in theory. There’s nothing conceptually hard about photographing small objects from a distance in a pleasing way. It’s the practice that’s hard. Really, really hard.