shot from the set later – the one where the wings are perfectly
spread, not half obscuring its face!
Bird Mode Tip: When asking for a fast shutter speed like this in
Tv (or ‘S’) mode, your camera will usually automatically select
your lens’s smallest ‘f ’ number (or the largest aperture hole, to let
as much light in as possible). This creates a small or ‘shallow’
Depth of Field (DoF) which gives you a wonderfully blurry
background and foreground, but sometimes, particularly with long
lenses that go down to a small ‘f ’ numbers (like f/4), you may find
that the DoF is too small which results in only part of the bird
being in focus with the far wing perhaps being ‘too far away’ and
no longer sharp. Another reason why this small DoF can
sometimes be annoying is that with multiple AF-points enabled
(rather than using the single, centre AF point), you lose precise
focus control. The camera may, for example, choose to focus on
the wing, rather than the bird’s head, resulting in the same
dilemma of only part of your bird being in focus! In these
situations it’d be nice to be able to dial up your ‘f ’ number a bit to
give yourself a slightly larger DoF, but being in Tv mode, we don’t
have control over our ‘f ’ number - or do we? Well, we kind of do- via the ISO setting. Left on ‘Auto’, your ISO will only be lifted
just high enough to get the shutter speed you’ve requested
(using the smallest ‘f ’ number). When setting up to shoot a given
scene, if you note what ISO the camera is auto-selecting, and
instead dial in a higher ISO value, thus making the camera more
sensitive, then the camera will respond by closing the aperture
hole a bit (lifting its chosen ‘f ’ number), giving you a bigger DoF!
That’s much quicker than heading back over to Av mode and
dialling in a bigger ‘f ’ number and also then having to manually
select an ISO that gives you a fast enough shutter speed.Panning Mode
Deliberately using a slow shutter speed while tracking a
moving subject can produce beautiful results where the leopard
(or whatever your subject is) appears sharp (because tracking it as
it walked means you’ve kept the subject in the same part of the
frame for the duration of the photo), but the background behind
it has streaked-out from movement blur (of course, because you
panned the camera during the photo). Panning is a great way to
capture a feeling of movement in an image and a great technique
to embrace when the light is fading in the evening and
everyone’s struggling to get fast photos, but the problem is the
settings required are completely opposite to the camera settings
you’d normally use, and by the time you’ve dialled them in,
the moving subject has long since gone! Not any more, though,
if you set this ‘panning mode’ into a custom mode like I do!60 AUSTRALIANPHOTOGRAPHY.COM AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY + DIGITAL JULY 2015
ABOVE
The best way to
see Wineglass
Bay on Tasmania’s
beautiful east coast
is from the air, so
we charter a small
fixed-wing plane
to take our safari
guests over it. With
the right settings
to prevent camera-
shake (helped by
my custom ‘plane
mode’) even
shooting through a
window like this can
yield great photos.
Canon EOS 5D
Mk II, 16-35mm
lens @ 35mm,
1/2000s @ f/4.5,
ISO 400. Curves,
levels adjustment in
Lightroom 4.