Noticing I do not have enough *photos* on this website which after all was meant to be, well, the story of me learning nature photography, with this post I start a new category “Photo First” which will aim to present photos made by me without the whole story… I seem to be taking too long formulating my usually longer posts, and the photos get left behind.
This Mandarin duck photo I really like is from Xmas 2007. It was then and there when the first time I finally had the feeling that things were coming together in my bird photography: I had the sun in my back, had thought of putting the tripod very low (using an angle view finder), and even managed to get at least one kind-of-sharp image from the dynamic autofocus system. I liked the water color from the reflection of the vegetation behind the little pond, because it matches the duck’s own colors.
Looking at it today, I know it lacks critical sharpness. I tried to print it large (A2), and noticed the eye is slightly soft, as the autofocus targeted slightly behind the duck’s head. Got to try it again…
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Nice photo!
Don’t worry, the slight unsharpness can’t be noticed in the web version of the photo
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BTW, you may want to take a look at some plugins that make commenting easier, like “CommentLuv” or “Disqus” (I personally use the latter). They allow people to log in with their Twitter/Facebook/other credentials and deal with keeping out spam.
While we’re at it, I also like the SexyBookmarks plugin a lot, which is a glorified version of the “Share this” button.
Back to the photo: Now how would one get that perfect sharpness of the bird’s eye when the subject’s moving all the time? Calibrate your lense? Do a focus series? Movie mode?
Hi Constantin, thanks for the hint to the commenting sites, I’ll certainly have a look!
Regarding the photo, well, in theory the camera’s auto-focus if set to continuous mode (that’s servo mode on Canons I think) should have been able to acquire and track the duck as it was swimming towards me, predicting the velocity of the duck (not particularly high in this case) and focusing on the right spot where the duck would be – if it retained it’s velocity and movement direction – when the shutter opened and the image was captured.
What helps is a fast focusing lens, in this case it was my old screwdriver-type Tokina 300 mm f/4 which certainly is not the fastest, and a good lock of the auto-focus. It is only slightly off, but to my dismay enough to kill the image if viewed in large. My newer Sigma 100-300 f/4 I use these days has an ultrasonic motor for the focus drive and is much faster.
I do not think calibrating the lens would have made a difference, as I did get quite a few sharp images from the Tokina, so I would rule out a front or back-focus issue here. The focus series is nice, but won’t help much as the duck itself is moving (I indeed have done focus series on static subjects when I was unsure if the camera got the focus right).
Movie mode – that’s a nice one! Yes, the duck will paddle through the place of focus so looking at it frame by frame you will have at least one frame where the eye is sharp – But you have no guarantee that it’s not closing it’s eye blinking or actually looking away, birds tend to turn their heads very quickly…