February 14th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

Robin Couple 1/400 f11 400mm ISO800

I often leave home not expecting to get any pictures at all,  but with my 100-400mm lens attached to my camera, and my camera out of the bag hoping to see something.  Usually, this proves to be a waste of time.  Today,  I got a few images I liked out of it, and one that I love.  Birds are flirty little things.  You always see them being all pretty and showing off when you dont have your camera with you, but when you are packing a long lens they will be nowhere to be found.  There are two ways around this.  The first way is to go after them at known feeding locations.  Bird feeders in a park work well…. bird feeders in your back yard are perhaps even better.  The problem with is is that My lease prohibits feeding any animals, and I don’t have time to drive to the park every weekend.  Besides,  getting them when they are foraging for natural food sources usually makes for much more natural pictures. So, I just leave the house with a lens and a camera around my neck, and hope for the best.  Today, I lucked out.  Ironically enough, I had went to the bird store, to buy bird food for my love bird.  I had my car windows open on the way there,  but didn’t hear or see a thing.  When I got home,  I heard a Chickadee in the trees above our parking lot.  I couldn’t get very close, even with my 100-400mm lens,  but I steadied the camera on a SUV in the packing lot to get the best shots I could.  I wasn’t expecting much, as the bird was still tiny in my viewfinder,  and I would have to crop it hard to make him even visible.  If only I was dumb enough to climb trees with a camera…. but not in this lifetime.

Soon enough, I got boared with the Chickadee, figuring I probally wasnt getting anything good anyway.  I walked around to the front of the house, and Jackpot….. it was Birdy Lunchtime.  There was a large tree in front of the neighboring townhouse row, and under that tree was the most Robins I have seen togeather… possibly ever since paying attention to such things.  They were enjoying lunch together, courtesy of that same tree.  As usual with wildlife,  I started sneaking closer and closer to them….. taking a few pictures each time I got a little closer.  I wanted to expose well for the birds…. but I wasn’t sure of best way to deal with the snow when it was the Birds I care about.  The snow was just throwing way too much light at me, and making my camera all kinds of cranky. I tried a +1 and a +2ev,  both of which were of marginal quality when I saw the files.  Im not sure if Spot meeting was helping or hurting me here.  Close to the end of my shooting, I did the right thing, which yielded the beautiful results at the beginning of this post.  I set the camera to full manual, the metering mode still set on Spot meeting.  I Metered a correct exposure off the trunk of the Tree that they were under,  filling the frame with Tree bark and setting the aperture and shutter speeed to expose the tree trunk properly.  The birds were in the same light, and this took the snow out of the equation for proper metering, and in my opinion, worked wonderfully. The reason this works well is that the color of the Tree bark is MUCH closer to the color of the birds feathers than say… snow.  The thing to remember is this:  If you just cant nail down the right exposure on your subject…..  nail the correct exposure on something nearby that will react to light in a similar way, and is  in the same light…. lock it in as a manual setting, and then go back to your subject.  This is also very useful if your subject itself is bright or dark.  For example,  If you are shooting a picture of a big black ape,  and you want him to look like a big black ape, and not a big grey ape,  you might get your meter reading manually off of the green tree next to him, as a green tree is much closer to neutral than your Black furry critter.  The key is in remembering that you camera wants everything to be neutral. If you want to get really fancy, and have free time and subjects that don’t care,  you could even break out a Grey card, and use that to set both your exposure and white balance, but how often are the birds going to be that patient?