52 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
PROJECT 3
VIDEO ALSO ONLINE
http://bit.ly/photoplus163STEP 1 GET YOUR FOCUS
SETTINGS RIGHT
When you’ve attached your telephoto lens,
such as a 70-300mm or 150-600mm, to the
camera body it’s time to set up the focusing.
Sloths and tortoises aside, animals rarely
stay still for long. AI Servo AF will allow you to
keep up with any sudden movements. Set it
to Single Point AF with the active AF point in
the middle of the frame, or try using a group
of AF points around the middle, if the animal
is particularly difficult to track.
Now set the drive mode to Continuous
High, so you can rattle off a quick burst of
images if the animal is quite unpredictable in
their movements. This will give you a better
chance of capturing the moment you want.
STEP 2 DIAL IN THE RIGHT
CAMERA SETTINGS
Shooting in Aperture Priority will allow you
to use a negative exposure compensation
value to help darken the shadows. We also
found that the Spot Metering mode’s ability
to take a light meter reading for the subject
made it a bit easier to shroud the
background in dark shadows.
Tweak the ISO value until you get a rapid
shutter speed of at least 1/1000 sec or
faster, as this will be fast enough to remove
any chance of camera-shake creeping in.
Although image stabilization isn’t much use
at such fast shutter speeds, we turned IS on
for those impromptu moments when it was
required. For Canon lenses with IS modes
you can simply set this to Mode 1.VIEW^ TH
E^ VIDEO