It took me a while to sit and wait in the car in Florida to get a good shot of this bird. The Western Meadowlark is pretty easy to spot and photograph here in Colorado – I can often get pretty close to them without scaring them away.
Shot with Nikon D3s and Nikon 300mm f/4.0 AF-S lens in aperture priority mode, Auto ISO with Minimum Shutter Speed set to 1/1000th, f/10 for increased depth of field.
About Nasim Mansurov
Hi Nasim,
I have a aperture question for you. So this time you used f/10 and you mention due to the necessity to get increased depth of field, but I noticed that in some of the other bird photos you use f/5.6. Why did you pick f/10 for this one and not a smaller aperture? What part of the photo will suffer from the shorter depth of field?
I’ve read that, due to the “natural” aperture between f/8 – f/11 of every lens you tend to get the best sharpness using those values, so I understand one of the reasons why we could prefer that aperture interval (also not counting with exposure compensations). I think that your photo looks just perfect so I’m just trying to understand the thought process.
thanks,
Rodrigo, sorry for a late response!
I shot the above image from the car, sitting too close to the bird. If I used a larger aperture such as f/5.6, I would have gotten one part of the bird sharp, while everything else would be out of focus, due to a shallow depth of field.
Hope this makes sense, let me know if I was able to answer your question.
Hi Nasim,
You always come back to us replying to our questions/comments, so no worries :)
Yes you answer my question. Technically speaking my handicap is understanding, during the small amount of time I have, what will be the best aperture for that instant. On my D40, without even a depth of field preview button, I can’t really see the different effect of an aperture setting without shooting and review, and by then it might be too late to redo the photo.
Anyway, thanks for the explanation, it raised my attention concerning the aperture I’m using. I got a couple of shots some time ago of a composition with two persons per kayak with the first person (closer to me) in focus and the second, very slightly behind, out of focus. At the time my intention was to have those two faces in focus and, as much as possible, unfocused background. Back home I was sad to see that most of my photos were ruined. If there’s any trick you use, or used before until all this became automatic for you, to avoid these issues let me (us) know.
Many thanks,
When photographing birds, do you always use a centred composition? Or can you use an off centred look?
Robert, yes, I do use off-centered composition as well, depending on what I have in the frame. Unfortunately with birds, it is often hard to compose an image…they are so fast that you mostly worry about getting a sharp image.