Wildlife Photography_ From Snapshots to Great Shots - Laurie Excell [44]
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Note
You have to be trying new things, stretching your photographic wings to continue to grow. In the process, there will be failure; learn from your failures, and then go back out and give it another try. The success is all the sweeter from the effort.
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Still using Aperture Priority and my other normal wildlife settings (Chapter 2), I dial down the aperture to a smaller opening (f16–f22) in low light or work in low light without raising the ISO, which results in a slower shutter speed. I then pan with a bird in flight, and if I’m panning at precisely the same speed, I capture the head and eye in focus with the wings pleasantly blurred, giving a sense of motion that is not present in the stop-action image (Figure 8.12).
Figure 8.12 Shooting at a slow shutter speed and panning with a bird in flight creates a pleasing blur to the wings while keeping the eye in focus.
Another method for creating pleasing blurs is to lock down the tripod and shoot a still subject with movement around it, as in the grizzly bear image taken at Brooks Falls (Figure 8.13). It took several frames to get the bear sharp as he was scanning the water in search of fish, but he did pause at the end of each scan, giving me a few seconds to make a shot. With this method, the bear remains sharp and the water blurs nicely around it, giving a sense of motion around the bear.
Figure 8.13 Shooting at a slow shutter speed with the camera mounted on a tripod allows the water to blur and everything stationary to remain sharp.
Although I do end up discarding lots of images when I’m working with blur pans, I also find some images that, even though they don’t fit the normal criteria of having a sharp eye, make pleasing, abstract blurs. One such image was made while panning with a small group of sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico while I was working on my blur pans. There are no sharp eyes, but you can still tell what they are, and the end result is whimsical, fun, and creative (Figure 8.14).
Figure 8.14 The late evening light and the soft blur of the sandhill cranes make a beautiful abstract blur.
It can be difficult finding your subject in the viewfinder with a telephoto lens. I begin by attaching my lens shade with the tightening screw facing up in line with the viewfinder (Figure 8.15). This gives me a sight to use to find the bird before bringing the camera to my eye. Next, I adjust my focus to infinity so that the subject is more visible (not a blur that is hard to distinguish from the background). Then I follow the sightline as I bring the camera to my eye, and when I look through the viewfinder, my subject is there. It’s then a simple matter to find focus and adjust the composition so that I am ready for action.
Figure 8.15 Aligning the viewfinder to the tightening screw on the lens shade provides a sight (or target) to help you place the subject in the viewfinder quickly and easily.
How do you hone your blur panning skills so that when you are faced with a situation that would make pleasing blurs, you are on top of your game? Practice, practice, practice is the answer, and you can find many situations in which you can practice your panning near home. Go to the local park (Chapter 5) to photograph birds in flight, dogs running, and so on. One particularly windy day in Florida I realized that we were not going to get any bird activity because the wind was too fierce and the birds had all hunkered down to wait out the wind. (Wildlife does not particularly like wind; their senses become dulled in the wind. They can’t hear or smell where danger is coming from.) I was about to give up and suggest that we head back to the hotel to do some postprocessing and image