Birds in Flight (1 Viewer)

Hi all
Hope you can help.
Just had a great weeks holiday in Norfolk and got some great photos.
The problem I don’t seem to able to work out, is birds in flight.
There were lots of birds of prey flying over the marshes and although I tried my best they all seem to come out silhouettes .
I tried different speeds and bracketing but the results were still poor in my eyes.
Just like to know if I am missing something here.
I was using a Canon 300D and Sigma 500mm lens
Any advise will be well received
Thanks Mick

With the birds being against the sky backlighting is virtually always a problem as generally the sky is brighter than the bird so the camera meters exposure from the bright sky rather than the dark bird.

I don't have the 300D but the problem affects whichever camera you use.

Spot metering is perhaps the obvious thing to do, but likely only successful if the bird is pretty close to fill the frame - rarely the case.

There are several ways to tackle this but perhaps the easiest is to use the camera EV+/- compensation feature. A dark bird against a bright background may need 0.7 or 1.0 compensation. In effect though the camera still takes it's meter reading from the sky it's reading is offset to brighten the image, hopefully to correctly expose the bird. You do need to practice to get the feel for it or take trial exposure shots until the setting is right for the subject.

An alternative method would be to simply take an exposure reading from the ground or similarly coloured object to the bird and lock the exposure. Simply half depressing the shutter button on my camera locks the exposure for that shot and then reframe onto the bird and manually focus. The camera may have an AE lock which lets you do the same thing but also use the camera autofocus. Similarly you can prefocus on something the same distance as the bird is away which is of similar colour and switch to manual and wait for the bird to come past that point.

Also taking the photo of a bird in flight as it passes say a tree in the background or for birds like Marsh Harriers as they fly low with a background of higher ground should give better chance of correct exposure.

Someone with this or a similar DSLR may be able to give more detail.

Hi Ian
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I will give this a go next time i'm out, with any luck i might get a few good shots
Mick

Hi,

The other thing you can try with a Canon 300D is to shoot in Raw mode, then do the exposure comp. in post-processing.