Hey guys.
Welcome back to Pangolin Photo Safaris.
I am Janine and I would like to help you with your camera
settings for wildlife photography.
Whether you received a brand new camera body go on your very first safari, or
simply haven't picked up your camera in a while, I want to help you get
ready so that you don't miss a shot.
This will be a two part series, and in my first video I will touch on your
basic camera set-up, mentioning the five most important settings, including
focusing metering, your frame rate, white balance, and picture style.
The second video will then dive right into your ideal wildlife settings, regardless
of the shooting mode you choose.
These videos will share all the little details that I wish someone
would've told me from the start.
Maybe you enjoy wildlife but simply don't get enough opportunity.
Or you do have the eye for beautiful portraits, but those camera settings
have always been too technical for you in order to implement your creative ideas.
Fast moving wildlife and ever changing sceneries can be intimidating as
you feel like you lose control.
After all, the top rule in wildlife photography is 'You snooze.
You lose'.
Those animals certainly don't wait up.
After this series, though, you will feel way more confident and can
get ready for your next adventure.
Let's start with the focus.
One of the most important factors of wildlife photography
is getting your focus right.
After all, everything seems to be moving and often unpredictably.
To manage that, you will have to set your camera to continuous
auto focus or AI Servo.
That means you will be able to continuously focus and track moving
subjects by simply keeping your finger halfway on your top focus
button or full on your back button.
You will now have to keep the focus point on your subject as it moves, and
the camera should automatically adjust its focus to keep the animal sharp.
This is one of the largest changes you need to make coming from still, or
portrait photography, or even a cell phone where your camera will lock on permanently
and subject willingly stand still.
However, it is the only way to avoid having to lift your finger
every split second from your focus button and refocus a new while the
animal changes its distance to you.
It makes the whole process so much easier and it's pretty much a must, especially
when you like action and behaviour.
A disadvantage, however, is that your camera automatically
refocuses as soon as your focus point falls off, off your subject.
Therefore, the well known process of focusing and recomposing is
not available to you anymore.
Instead, you will have to shift the focus point within your frame
ahead of time to ensure your animal eye does not sit dead center in
your picture for every single shot.
This drawback can be avoided by learning how to use your back button focus by
separating the focus from your trigger.
You can choose when to track the subject by keeping your thumb permanently
on the back button or lock onto a non-moving target by focusing and
letting go, which then allows you to use the good old fashioned recomposing.
If you would like this process explained in more detail., then please check
out my video on black button focusing.
Once you set your focus drive correctly, you now need to choose
your focus point selection.
Most modern mirrorless cameras offer some sort of animal eye tracking that
makes the process so much easier.
But with my experience eye tracking is particularly helpful
if you're working with birds or other commonly shaped animals.
Elephants for instance, are not being recognized easily at all.
Therefore, I also still use a single point focus on larger and slower moving mammals
to be sure my tracking doesn't just pick up on the face, the ear, or the snout,
but is right on the eye of the animal.
It is helpful to always set up a minimum of two buttons on your mirrorless camera.
One that has a good old fashioned single point focus that you control with
your joystick and a tracking option.
The same holds for all the DSLR cameras that do not have tracking available.
You might program a second focus button to offer you a cluster focus for birds
and flight rather than working with only one focus point selection at a time.
If you want to learn more about your focus, then please check out Sabina
and Danielle's videos on focusing next.
Let's move on to your frame rate.
You might have shot on single shot for most of your life, maybe because your
focus was on portrait and landscape photography, or because you're coming from
the good old film base in using high speed continuous bursts simply seems wasteful.
We have moved on though, and if you are chasing the perfect wildlife photo,
You will not be able to avoid it.
The most exciting part of wildlife photography is
witnessing action or interaction.
That is how we learn about the animals we are trying to portray correctly represent.
A split second can be the difference between the perfect
pose or overlapping mess.
However, that doesn't mean that you always need to choose the highest
possible frame rate per second.
New cameras have become so powerful that they can easily shoot 30
frames per second and faster.
That is essentially the same thing as shooting video.
I have found that going through that quantity of photographs doesn't
just overwhelm me when attempting to manage cull and organize my
pictures, but also my computer.
I'm a big fan of building 1:1 previews for my culling process.
And going from 12 frames per second to 30 frames per second has simply
overwhelmed the storage capacity of my system, and I cannot keep up with culling.
My advice is to shoot more than six frames per second and less than 16.
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It really helps.
Now I will double check your metering mode.
Your metering mode will affect the way you will use your exposure
compensation in wildlife photography.
While I don't particularly think there's a right or wrong, I find you really
need to understand your choice well in order to select your correct exposure.
This is tightly linked to your shutter, aperture and ISO.
So please check out my second video of this two part introduction to
your Wildlife Photography settings.
I will run through a great summary of how to prioritize those settings in wildlife.
Coming back to our metering, essentially it determines how the camera
measures the quantity of light that.
It breaks up your frame into little squares for evaluation
and finds an average of how bright your image is overall.
Your camera then tries to automatically darken or brighten the frame to match
luminance of middle grey, which is considered to be a perfect exposure.
In simple terms, if your camera meters the frame to be very bright
it darkens your photograph to match the middle grey, and if your camera meters
very dark, it brightens your frame.
Now your camera has a multitude of options, how to meter the brightness.
It can either measure the entire frame or choose a smaller area to evaluate
while ignoring all the other pixels in.
According to factory settings, all cameras are set to measure the entire
area with a slight priority being placed to where your focus point is.
That is ideal for landscape photography.
However, in wildlife, our main focus, namely our animal, often only
comprises about 20 to 40% of our image, and we really want to make
sure that we are perfectly exposed for our animal rather than the backdrop.
Choosing a smaller metering area such as partial spot or center weighted
comes with its own challenges, and these metering modes often only measure
the center of your frame, and who says that our animal will be centered
in our composition even if the meter moves with the focus point to where our
animal sits, It can be a tricky choice as your focus moves a lot in wildlife.
Okay.
Therefore, every single shot you take might have a slightly different exposure
as your camera evaluates subtle changes in light based on the location of
the meter moving across your frame.
That being said, I would advise to stick to your factory settings and use matrix or
evaluative matrix, while it does meter the entire frame, which is often unnecessary,
it will provide you with the most
consistent light measurement that will not randomly change the
brightness of your frame based on tiny little movements without you
actually changing your settings.
However, metering everything means you will constantly have to
compensate for your background.
Over, and underexposing will have to become part of your shooting habits.
The more background is in your frame and the more it differs in
luminance from your subject, the more you have to compensate for it.
Let's use one of the most extreme examples.
If you have shadow in the backdrop and light on your subject, you need to, let's
say, go all the way down to a minus three.
However, if your subject is just slightly darker than your backdrop,
you would maybe only go to plus 0.7.
So our rule of thumb, If your subject is darker than your backdrop, you
overexpose, and if your subject is brighter, you underexpose.
If you prefer to use spot metering, you don't have to bother with
your exposure compensation much.
Just double check that it actually meters from your focus point and be
extra careful with multicolored animals.
If you need more information on this, please check out Sabine's metering video.
Or my video on exposure compensation.
Now you need to set your white balance.
If you shoot on raw, I wouldn't worry much about it, as all your information
is being recorded and you can always change and adjust and post production.
I like to fix my white balance, though as I don't like the camera
changing the temperature automatically during my session without my input.
It simply throws me off when pictures suddenly change in temperature.
Therefore, I have set a Kelvin of 5,200 throughout the day.
It does get a bit warm during the golden hour, and you can drop
it further if you feel like it.
If you do shoot in jpeg, however, you will have to set your white balance
consciously, as you will be limited with your information and post production.
Usually you set it once for the day, depending on your weather.
However, in JPEG, it is crucial to change your white balance
towards the end of the day when the sun is getting low and golden.
Otherwise, your animals will be too yellow.
Shooting in overcast weather is probably the easiest in that regard as you can
keep on shooting on the same temperature.
Last but not least, we quickly need to check your picture style or picture
control as well as your quality.
~This will vary drastically on what quality you'll be shooting on.
If you shoot on raw, your picture style will be reflected both on your camera LCD
screen when reviewing your images, as well as within your brand owned post-production
software, such as Canon's DPP, or Nikon NX
for example.
However, it will not truly affect your RAW file as you can edit
it to your liking with all the information still at your hands.
It is basically a display of how it could potentially look like, one out
of many possible previews, but you can disassemble it and edit it differently.
Adobe, for instance, doesn't show any of the color profile and picture
controls you have chosen when importing it into Lightroom or Camera RAW.
You simply receive a blank canvas or pretty dull looking picture, and
that now requires your expertise.
Shooting on JPEG, however, means you are defining the image to look
exactly as set in your camera, including your sharpness, vividness,
clarity, color tone, contrast etc.
You cannot change it anymore in retrospective, and therefore you need
to make a careful choice based on the type of subject you want to shoot.
When shooting on raw in wildlife photography, I like to choose a standard
picture style and increase my sharpness and clarity slightly in order to have an
easier time judging an image on a small LCD screen on the back of my camera.
However, this does affect your contrast within your image and
therefore biases your histogram.
If you would like the best representation of where your whites and blacks are
within the scope of your histogram, it is probably best to shoot on a neutral or
flat color style as a base for your RAW.
When shooting on JPEG standard is also a very versatile way of shooting.
However, please ensure not to push the sharpness extra in this case.
Based on how high your ISO is an increased sharpness can increase
your noise and it will look grainy, crunchy, or over sharpened.
Rather, add some additional sharpness in post production than over
sharpening some images from the get go.
Whether you want to shoot in RAW or JPEG, depends on whether you spend any time
editing your photographs in retrospective.
In a RAW file, you'll have much more freedom within your editing
process, and especially if you work on creative captures.
By drastically changing your exposure, you'll require the information at
the very fringe of your dynamic range to get decent results.
At JPEG, you can crop and change marginally, but if the image was
shot incorrectly in camera, there is little you can do to alter it.
However, it does give you very, very quick results.
Which process you prefer is entirely up to you.
If you would like to learn more about editing your images, please check out
my free Lightroom Course for Beginners.
This is it for today.
In the second half of this series, I will explain which
settings to use to successfully shoot wildlife out in the field.
a quick summary on the exposure triangle will make clear what our priorities
are, in which pitfalls to avoid.
I hope you really enjoyed this video and that I will see you for the follow up.
If you would like to practice in the field with me, please check out Pangolin
Photo Safari packages just down below.
Cheers.