I was reading Arthur Morris’s blog today when I noticed that he was shooting with wildly different settings than I was. He seemed to be using a wide open aperture, and a relatively high 400 ISO even in sunlight, while relying on the camera to eliminate grain. This let him shoot with shutter speeds as fast as 1/2000 of a second. He had much better lenses than I did, but I still thought it might be worth a try, so I took a quick spin around the ponds at Mason Park in the late afternoon and see how this did. My lense would only open up to f/6.3 at 300mm–his could f/4–but it did make a big difference as seen in this photo of a Western Bluebird:
Western Bluebird
Tamron 28-300 Di VC on an EOS 50D body, ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/2000s
Moral of the story: Shoot birds in Av mode with maximum aperture, and ISO 400 or greater. I’m used to thinking of f/8 as my maximum aperture but for birds I’m not as concerned with depth of field as I am with bugs. Plus the 50D can really handle the the higher ISOs, even in bright sunlight. I’m still hoping for a better lens, but I now don’t feel quite such an urgent need for one.
I think what’s going on here is reminiscent of thread priorities, where one gives the highest priority to the least computationally intensive task, because it will leave plenty of room for other more CPU bound tasks. This is the exact opposite of most people’s initial intuition. In this case I cared about shutter speed so I was setting it, but I should have been setting the other parameters instead and letting the shutter speed get as fast as possible. (Also I needed to simply not care as much about ISO and aperture.)
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