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joseph cole's picture

minimal quality

I'm getting frustrated lately, the last 3 times i have been out i have had less than horrible results. i went to a wildlife/land preserve to try my hand at wildlife photography and it did not turn out well. nothing but blurry out of focus too slow of a shutter speed probably too low of an iso. i guess the best i can take from my experience is that i have learned what not to do. tomorrow i will be heading to a favorite new spot of mine and trying again.

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5 Comments

Remember that when photographing wildlife it is super important to have your autofocus set to af-c (continuous servo mode).

Hi Joseph with wildlife you really mostly need to be using a telephoto lens.That is unless you are using a hide. Nick Birks in Australia did an amazing book on birds of prey years ago shooting mainly with a wide angle lens from a hide.Image stabilisation on the lens and/or the camera is a big help. I mainly shoot with single shot autofocus as if using a rifle. I have got fairly good at that over the years but not every shot is a winner.I should try continuous autofocus as John suggests.These bird shots are a bit far away to be anything really worthwhile other than to show habitat.High Iso and fast shutter speed is usually essential. If you want to learn from the master look up Arthur Morris on youtube.He is arguably the doyen of Bird Photographers.
google Birds as Art. I quite like the raindrops shot.

Learning photography takes time, a lot of time, simple as that. This will not be the last time you return home empty-handed and no matter which path you choose (landscape, wildlife, street, fashion, food, ...) none of them is easier to master than the others. Pick the path that peaks your interest and then stick with it, don't pick one you're only mildly interested in. If your heart isn't in it, you'll never become a master in your chosen field. Be ambitious, try to learn all there is to learn, even if it seems daunting at first (can you say Photoshop?) and above all practice, practice, practice.

the problem is i want to be good at everything i know i don't want to be a product photographer so i know where my boundaries lye but i am mostly interested in landscape, nature, long exposure, B&W and portrait. i am definitely getting my practice in on landscape and i feel I'm improving with all of the help i am receiving from the community. it took me 10yrs to become a good painter i want to crush this medium in less than 5.

Don't we all want to master a craft in half the time it took others? ;-)

You see, I've been taking photos since the start of the eighties, I had an SLR (the Canon A-1), a remarkable and very expensive camera back then. I developed my B&W pictures myself, which was quite a mess and arguably hazardous to my health. At around the mid-80s I started writing software (which later on would become my daytime job), so I'm very proficient with anything digital and with software in particular. Perfect skillset for digital photography, I'd say. But there's so much stuff that I'm still clueless about and I'm quite sure it will take another couple of years before my pictures look the way I want them too. There are no shortcuts, if there were, other photographers would have found them long before me already.