I drove to the Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary, Sultanpur National Park, recently armed with the old Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel DSLR I had bought from a colleague sometime back. The camera, rarely used and in excellent condition, had come with two lenses. An 18-55 mm lens and a 100-300 mm lens. I took only the big 100-300 mm zoom lens with me. I tried my hand at bird photography for the first time. I’d only sat at the window and clicked pictures of pigeons before this.
Here are a few pictures I took. I deleted many more. I learnt it is not easy to photograph birds. The big birds perch considerably far, are wary of humans and at 60 feet fly away if they think you are very close. This renders the focal length of 300m inadequate at many times. The small birds merge very well their surroundings, are never still and keep hopping from branch to branch. This makes it very difficult to focus on them.
I set the aperture at 5.6 and used the shutter speeds of 1/500s and above.
Your comments are welcome
OK TATA
Dream it, Feel it, Live it
Hi Sameer
Neeraj here…..what was the aperture range of the 100 – 300mm lens. The photographs are good but as you correctly noticed, the separation of foreground and background may not be that much at F/5.6 for 300mm. Nonetheless, the first picture (bird taking flight) is quite bokehlicious……
Neeraj
Hi Neeraj,
I will look up the raw image and dig up the aperture details. The picture with the bird’s eye in focus happened by chance. I heard a flutter of wings behind me, turned round and everything happened very fast.
By the way the 100-300mm lens gives sharp images only at big aperture numbers I read somewhere.
I like bokeh too but have recently noticed a drawback when it is used in portraits of people posing in front of monuments. The person is in focus and the monument (context) out of focus. Documentary photographers use 30mm on full frame I read. That provides a wide view of the area around the subject and the readers can see the context.
Sameer