Mastering Birds in Flight III

Thus far in this series on mastering birds in flight, we have discussed camera equipment, autofocus systems, and the interplay of light and backgrounds. As we advance as photographers, once the technical stuff is mastered, it’s things like being able to recognize the impact different backgrounds have on our photographs that become the thing that allows our images to stand out from the rest of the crowd. But if our photos are soft, if we can’t quite seem to acquire focus, if struggle with maintain a proper exposure, or if we can’t even find the damn bird with the lens, then all the beautiful light and sexy backgrounds in the world aren’t going to do us a lot of good.

And so, in this next installment of Mastering Birds in flight, I’m going to discuss exposure settings and strategies for acquiring focus on the subject.

Whenever I am leading a workshop where birds in flight are brought into the mix, the first question that comes up is always the same, “what should my settings be?”

It’s understandable.

Camera settings appear complicated at first. Given that the vast majority of people running around with a camera in their hand today never had formal education in photography, what we have ended up with are bits and pieces of information and assumptions that are hold overs from the various stages of evolution in photography. Well, that and a whole lot of misunderstanding and regurgitation of wrong information.

In the film days, you had both slides and negatives. Professionals tended to shoot slides as this what magazines wanted for specific reasons. But slide film and negatives were different in several ways. And chief among those was the difference in dynamic range between them.

While negatives arguably had something in the neighborhood of around 10 stops of dynamic range, slide film was exactly half that number at only 5 stops. Two of those stops, however, were featureless black and pure white. And this meant shooting with a latitude of 5 stops of dynamic range only really gave you a latitude 3 stops of light to work with.

Now, add to this that basically all wildlife photography in those days was done using the ISO equivalent of between 64 and 800. Of course, we called it ASA back then instead of ISO.

So, when digital came out and democratized photography, allowing a low bar of entry for the world to get into this as a hobby, you had folks who had made a name for themselves professionally that began teaching workshops and writing books about wildlife photography for the masses. And in doing so, they brought with them these extremely narrow sets of parameters that their work lived or died by in the age of slide film. Even today, I can’t look at the flank of an elk and not think, “18% grey.”  

I remember having breakfast at a place called The Bunnery, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with three other photographers I had once idolized in my early 20s when I was trying to figure out how to make a living as a wildlife photographer. I was a little older by then (meaning in my 30s), living in the valley, and somehow supporting a family doing this stuff. Even still, it was probably the biggest honor of my life at that time to even be sitting at the table drinking coffee and talking shop with these guys. One of them was the most financially successful wildlife photographer in the world. Another was world renowned for his work with National Geographic. And the topic that morning, over obscenely large cinnamon buns, was should we expose differently for digital photography?

This was 2012.

Digital was solidly in consumer’s hands for nearly a decade at this point and here were a couple of the biggest names in wildlife photography (excluding myself from that title), talking about whether histograms were something we should be thinking about, and should it change how we expose photos.

I think back to that moment, and it blows my mind – especially given that it’s only been 12 years since that conversation.