Keiko Natural Images Web Log

If you’re like me, you’ve always initially thought the fastest camera out there was indispensable for shooting action photography like in-flight birds. Since I have both the D200 and the D2h, my 8 fps D2h would be the camera of choice when shooting this kind of subject. We… To try something new, I decided just how good and useful a D200 could be used for action photography like flying birds.

The quick report? The D200 works like a champ. The shutter lag was practically non-exsistent–just as quick as the D2h. The focus speed was pretty good–hard to tell the difference. The frame rate was much lower–only 17 worthwhile images in a two hour setting. Overall–it worked pretty well.

What does this mean. First, I can probably get away with sacrificing a little frame rate for camera size. I shot with the D200 for a couple of hours and really didn’t tax my bulging D2h built biceps. The D200 is much lighter and this feature showed when shooting mostly handheld this last weekend. This means to me that I should feel bad at all if and when I’m shooting with my 500mm on the tripod while simultaneously having a light weight camera over the shoulder that should get the job done.

BTW, the image was shot near a trail head with lots of acclimatized humming birds frequenting local feeders. What you see in the background of this image is one of the bulletin boards with descriptions of local trail conditions written on very obvious paper. The out of focus paper frames the humming bird quite nicely in this case.

Cheers

Tom

One of the challenges any nature photographer faces is dealing with his environmental conditions while still getting significant images. In this case, the challenge was shooting moving subjects in very low light. Instead of stressing over the conditions, I decided to make some lemonade with the lemons I was given. Here, I was in Jasper NP shooting pre-dawn. I knew the herd of cows would eventually cross the road. Knowing the light was too dark to get subject sharp images, I decided to shoot pan blurs. I also wanted to get some portion of the animal tack sharp. The solution was to shoot with just enough flash to highlight the animal. The problem with that was you’d probably get “steel-eye”. This is essentially the flash light reflecting off the back of your subject’s retina. You get a kind of other worldly devil kind of look. I didn’t want this. To avoid that, I needed to adjust my flash to shoot only just enough. Since I’m not much to depend on everything on the camera’s auto settings this meant I needed to manually adjust the output power of my flash to get just enough light. Before my cow crossed the road, I practiced on several others. Taking advantage of the camera’s LCD, I adjusted the exposure–camera and flash–to get exactly what I wanted before my cow crossed the road.

By the time she did, I was completely ready. I fired off about five perfectly exposed images when she crossed in front of me.

So, the next time you’re wondering what to do and can’t decided to make a blurry or sharp image, do both. Use multiple techniques to make an interesting look.

Cheers

Tom