Photographing rescued birds

It has been a long time since I last posted, actually three months, and now I am getting ready to pack up and go back to where I made one of my first posts.

I have been deeply involved with photography, despite my lack of posting in my blog. I simply have not had the time.

Today I would like to talk about using a long zoom lens to photograph birds in the shade or partial shade, and without using a tripod. I wrote two posts in the past about choosing a long lens and the joys and sorrows of doing it. I ended up buying a Nikon 70-300 mm zoom, which is not a very fast lens, in the two senses of the word. It does not have a very wide aperture (f/4.5-5.6G), particularly at the 300 mm end, and it is very slow focusing. This means two things: in order to get sharp pictures, a lot of light is needed and the subject needs to be relatively immobile.

Last weekend we had Meetup at the Suisun Wildlife Center in Fairfield. I though it would be a good opportunity to photograph birds that met both requirements above. I went armed with my tripod, long lens, and some hope.

The birds' handlers did not want to stay in the sun, understandably, so the lots of light part failed. There were also too many other photographers there, which made the use of a tripod particularly cumbersome, plus it took some of my ability to frame fast as the handler, and bird, moved.

I did get good pictures adopting the following strategy: I set my metering to spot metering, set the shutter speed to at least the 1/focal length of the lens, my ISO set to 400, and then I worked with the aperture the camera gave me, or close. 

Nikon D3100
Nikon 70-300 mm at 270 mm
f/9 1/200 ISO 400
spot metering

Another strategy that also worked was to set the ISO to 600 or 800, and do the rest as above.  The picture above was taken in full light and the one below in the shade.

Nikon D3100
Nikon 70-300 mm at 270 mm
f/7.1 1/1000 ISO 800spot metering