So, for those of you that read my earlier blog post this evening, you’ll have already read my adventures of the day. (If you haven’t click here). I was so pleased at capturing this (relatively!) elusive animal that I wanted to share the other images that I managed to get on my expedition! As I said in my earlier post, these aren’t great – most are blurred due to camera shake or the exposure was terrible – I’ve tried to improve these a little in Photoshop to make them a bit more pleasing on the eye, but here are the shots. Click on the images to see the full-size images.
These are the very firsts shot that I managed to get – as you can see very blurry. This was taken a f/8, 1/30sec exposure with ISO-400. The focal length is maxed out at 300m, which is why the camera shake is so bad. The exposure needed to be at least 1/300sec or I should have increased the ISO to about 1600.
After that second image, he’d bolted to the other side of the road, so I had a little chance to compose myself and adjust the settings, trying to get a cleaner shot. These next two were taken with exposure of 1/80, ISO-400 and f/5.6 apeture, still not enough really – these were both really under-exposed (especially the b&w image). Photoshop has saved them (a little)
Then by upping the ISO to 1600, I was able to get the correct exposure (ish) but still not enough to avoid the camera shake. It reduce its effect, I tried reducing the focal length (to 130mm) to get the following shot, but really he’s that far into the undergrowth you can only really make out his bob-tail.
So as a compromise, I set the focal length to 220mm, kept the aperture at f5.6, ISO-1600, but reduced the exposure to 1/80sec to get my final image, and was just lucky to get a sharp enough shot. I’ve never really played with the ISO setting so much before, so I was surprised how much of an impact it had on fixing the exposure of the image. Next time (assuming similar light conditions) I’d probably whack it up to 3200 with the other setting the same and work down from there. Still, full enjoyed my expedition, and next time I know I’ll be slightly better prepared to get some better shots!
Thanks for reading, hope that was useful to someone!
Jake