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Camera settings (1 Viewer)

tony.saw

Well-known member
Hi
I've serch through this forum for camera settings for a 40D with the 100-400 lens and it seems that most of the suggestions involve a high speed/high iso etc in preferably good light!
As such, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for settings for taking pictures in forest/jungle conditions where light and conditions are far from ideal.
Thanks
 
The 40D deals with noise very well, I use ISO400 as my starting point and happily push it higher as and when needed. I find that even ISO800 shots need no noise reduction on them, so in low light don't be afraid to bump up the ISo to give yourself higher shutter speeds. Personally in the situation you mention I'd put the camera into AV and set the aperture to f5.6 and start ar ISO800. If you find that you are getting really fast shutter speeds then stop the lens down to f8 and if you still have more than enough speed the drop the ISO a bit. If you are not getting fast enough speeds then push the ISO up, it's better to get sharp shots with a bit of noise then clean shots that suffer motion blur.
 
I set up the C1 custom setting for birds: I use only the center focus spot, I start at ISO 1000 and f:6.3 aperture priority early in the day and adjust down as the light is better during the day. I use offset of +2/3 stop and adjust as I can with rear wheel according to light. I find +2/3 helps for both birds in shade and backlit birds on branches then shift to 0 for the few birds in good light. I set up C2 for all focus areas and program exp at ISO320 with no offset for other clear shots and landscapes. With both I use matrix metering.
I would welcome other settings from others to try to impove. The Canon 40 D with 100-400 is a great set up, but bird protography is very difficult and no one should expect a good batting average.
 
These are the settings I use for woodland birds, ISO 400 or auto, Aperture priority, one shot AF, center focus point, f5.6-f8, +,1/3 stop, Partial metering & Raw.
 
If I am really struggling to get a usable shutter speed I will underexpose by up to a stop and bring it back in Photoshop.
Problem with this is Mike that pushing the exposure in PS will increase noise esp. in the shadow areas but if this is the only way then I guess it is better than nothing.
 
Focusing on BIF is my only quibble with the 40D, but the settings seem quite accurate, Check out this link, these are my feelings also.


http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1019&message=24847288
Dont know about the 100-400 but with the 400 f5.6 prime I find focusing BIF with the 40D is better than the 30D (and streets better than the 350D). Thing is with the 40D that the AF is so good that if you lose the target for a split second it will lock right on to something else.
 
Hi Roy, this is the problem, someone on that site says the 1D has a setting to allow you to slow down the AF for that exact reason. I wish they had added it to the 40D too.
 
Hi Roy, this is the problem, someone on that site says the 1D has a setting to allow you to slow down the AF for that exact reason. I wish they had added it to the 40D too.
Yep, That would be handy Paul.

Just had a thought Paul, have you tried turning off 'Focus Search'. If there is nothing readily in focus it will not search for focus. Not to sure how this would effect locking on to the target in the first place though.
I disable the focus search when using a taped tc - this stops the lens from 'hunting'.
 
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In poor light, Tony, it gets hard. You will always battle for enough shutter speed, and there is not a great deal you can do about it. You have to push the ISO as high as you dare, knowing that this will reduce the amount of detail you can capture, you shoot wide-open (even though you might ideally want to stop down a bit for greater depth of field), and you have to tolerate much lower shutter speeds than you normally would. ISO 1600 is a sensible upper limit.

Getting closer to the bird becomes even more important than it usually is - the closer you get the less you have to crop, and the less zoom you need to use on the 100-400. That all helps. Here is an example shot with a 40D and a 100-400 in dreadful light just this weekend.

http://tannin.net.au/showpage.php?image=080713-082627-rqac.jpg

It can be done, but you have to work a lot harder!
 
What a great picture! Did you have to do much with this in photoshop (or similar), especially as shot at 1600. Also, did you under/over expose as suggested by others above?
Tony
 
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Not too much, Tony. (Which is just as well, as I'm by no means a post-processing wizard.) I ran Neat Image over it, using the same settings that I use for, oh, about 80% of all shots, but that's really only part of the story so far as noise reduction goes: the other part of it is to get as little noise into the picture in the first place.

As you can see from the EXIF info, I was at 1/200th (way too slow for 400mm hand-held), ISO 1600 and already wide-open at 400mm. There was nothing left by way of camera adjustments to make (ISO 3200 isn't really very helpful - on the 40D it's just an under-exposed ISO 1600 pushed a stop, which makes it very noisy), except for one thing: that is to remember that visible noise is inversely proportional to signal. If you under-expose, you get a lot more noise. If you over-expose, you get noticably less noise, but this only works if you have enough headroom to play with.

Looking at the histogram after the first few shots, I could see that there was a little room at the right-hand end, so I added 1/3rd of a stop of positive exposure compensation. Any more would have blown the highlights, but even one-third of a stop worth of extra signal makes noticably less noise and is worth having. (Google "expose to the right" for lots of detail on this. People tend to go on and on about it as if it were holy writ, but when it comes to coping with insufficient light as best you can, ETTR really does help.)

That gave me as noise-free an image as was practicable under the circumstances, a little over-exposed but no blown highlights, so easy to correct in PP.

Normally, I'd have done a lot better in the first place by using the right equipment: the 1D III insead of the 40D because it has fantastic low-light performance (ISO 1600 on the 1D III is close to the noise level of ISO 800 on the 40D); the 500/4 instead of the 100-400 (an extra stop would have been really useful, and if I'd had something like a 300/2.8 or a 400/2.8 that would have been better again); and an off-camera flash bracket with Better Beamer (actually at this distance you don't need the Better Beamer, the 580EX II is plenty powerful enough anyway). But, for complicated reasons I won't go into now, all I had with me was the 40D and the 100-400, so it was a case of make do with the tools at hand.

In desperation, I did try the little pop-up flash on the 40D, both in normal flash mode (manual exposure, letting the flash decide how much to apply) and fill-flash mode (aperture priority, which on Canon cameras kicks the camera into fill-flash mode). There is not a lot of point to using the pop-up flash at 400mm: it's too weak to do much and anything it does do risks giving you unnatural reflections and highlights, but I had time to try a few different things with this bird, so why not? Obviously, I had to remove the lens hood as otherwise the onboard flash would not get past the shadow the hood casts.

I should have dialed in a stop of negative flash exposure compensation, but in the heat of the moment I couldn't remember how to do this on a 40D (I mostly use flash with the 1D III which has a different control layout.)

In the end, there wasn't much difference between the shots with fill flash and the shots without. This particular one is with flash but I selected it more because I liked the pose than because of the extra light, which really only made the bird's white breast feathers look too bright in proportion to everything else. So I used the Photoshop shadow/highlight tool to roll back the highlights a bit, then went a bit further with a very light application of the burn tool. (I should probably do a little bit more again, it's still a touch hot.)

Finally, I decided that I wasn't happy with the white balance. You can tweak WB a bit with JPGs but it's much easier to do with a raw file, so I threw away my PP work so far and started again but with the raw this time, repeating my earlier steps only with better WB. I think I reduced the over-exposure a little bit in three different places rather than trying to do it all at once: in the raw converter, in Photoshop with shadow/highlight, and finally in PMView, which I use to make the final images (cropping, rotating, output sharpening, and sometimes a few other things - in this case, gamma correction).

But despite all the messing about I've detailed above, there are really only three important things I did to get a clean-looking image:
  • Neat Image (something you should use for nearly all images, even at ISO 200)
  • Don't underexpose, even go a little over if you can.
  • Most important of all, get close to the bird! If you have to crop a high ISO image, you are always going to battle to get any detail. This picture has been cropped, but only a little, and for composition rather than to compensate for the bird being too small in the frame. I was close enough to have the bird fill the viewfinder at 400mm, and that's the real secret to low-light, I think.

I hope all this helps!
 
Thanks for all the advice. Having just returned from staggering aroung the rainforest in PNG, I found that I needed to use as high an ISO as possible in order to get a reasonable speed. I also tended to overexpose by 2/3 stop. However waiting for the IS to kick in was also necessary rather than just shooting as soon as the focus locked on was also vital, hence a number of pictures of branches with no bird in sight! Neat image will be a boon!
Tony
 
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