Wildlife Photography 5 tips for Beginners 

This article is all about beginner's wildlife photography. Today I've picked out five tips which i think are really going to help you if you're just getting started.

Number one is auto focus mode so you're probably already using all to focus on your camera. I would suggest you use all to focus as a majority of the time when shooting wildlife manual focus can actually be useful on a few occasions the important thing to know is which autofocus mode you've got set in the camera so you've probably got two different options you'll have one focus mode which is single shot on Canon and maybe AFS on other cameras so this one basically where you focus of the camera and the focus locks and then it will take the picture and then your other one which is a continuous focus mode on the Canon cameras this is servo on other cameras such as Nickon it'll be AFC and this is a continuous focus so as long as you keep the focus engaged it's going to follow the subject around so you're moving birds animals for example so make sure that you know which focus you've got set on your camera. just be aware that you've got those two focus options and it's going to make a difference to your pictures as to which one you're using

Number two is focus points so I'd say this is probably as important as the first one when all the focus points lit up essentially the whole viewfinder is focusing on the subject the problem with that is that you don't know exactly where the camera is focusing so you want to know where you are focusing as accurately as possible so you'll have a center focus point and then you may have a group of focus points around that and what I'd suggest is that you try and use one focus point or a small group if possible but if you use all the focus points together then you're not really been very accurate in where you're focusing and it's really important to be as specific as you can when you're photographing wildlife. 

Number three is to use aperture priority this I think is a great setting for beginners what I would say further down the road when you're getting more into wildlife photography I'd really encourage you to try and use manual exposure and understand that as best you can but in the beginning I think after priority is a really good setting to use. you might have other settings such as shutter priority manual and then you may have these other options for specific situations like portraits landscape macro etc but the aperture priority AV the reason that this is so good I think is because if you set a wide aperture so if you set F 5.6 for example on a first priority setting the camera is always going to pick the fastest shutter speed that it can do given the situation of the lighting and the ISO that you using so it's good for that reason because you get a fast shutter speed which is really useful and not only stopping the subject movement but also in stopping some camera shake and both those things are going to help you to get sharp images the other advantage of the wide aperture is in most wildlife images you want the background to be out of focus and the bird to stand out nicely against it so your wide aperture it's going to do that so a priority with a wide aperture kind of does those two different things and I think it's a really good setting for beginners. 

Number four which is dealing with under exposure so a lot of the time very  common problem when you're shooting birds on branches against the sky or birds in flight against the sky for example you'll come out with underexposed images the images are too dark so the best way to deal with that again if you're using aperture priority setting the best way to manage that is to either you may have a dial which does this on the back of the camera or you'll have a plus/minus button and what you want to do is press that plus/minus button down and then there'll be some kind of dial either on the back or the top of the camera and you just want to go in the plus direction so if you move that dial to the plus Direction what you're basically doing is increasing the exposure making it bright and you're overriding the underexposure that the camera wants to do so it takes a bit of trial and error and experience as to how much but if you're photographing a bird against a cloudy sky for example then maybe try around plus one and see how you go with that.

Number five is continuous shooting so when you're photographing wildlife you don't just want to be taking a one shot at a time on a single frame setting you want to have it on continuous shooting or rapid-fire it's going to vary from camera to camera how fast it can be but you make sure you know where that setting is to change the frame rate so take it off single frame and put it on a continuous setting and the reason for that is it's not necessary all the time to take loads of pictures on the firing away like a machine gun but what it does it increases your chances of two things one it increases your chance of a pin sharp image because wildlife is generally moving around even if the birds sat on a perch it's still moving its head around and that kind of thing so the more pictures you take the more likely it is that one of those images the bird was slightly Stiller and it'll be pinched up and the other reason is just that it's the kind of pose that you might get so the more pictures you take especially if something's moving the more chance you've got of getting that one pose that is more pleasing to the eye so it will depend from camera to camera that this Canon 1dx does twelve frames a second which is just fantastic, you dearly want a frame rate of at least five frames a second which would make your life a bit easier and number six yeah I know I there was only five tips in this article but number six is such an important one included in this and that is please put the welfare of your subject first before anything else so if you're new to wildlife photography you know this may not be as familiar with you and but there's a lot of situations where subjects are disturbed more than they need to be so what I'd say is you all have instinct it's not a difficult sometimes to tell that an animal or a bird is uncomfortable for example if you know where the nest and you've got your camera ready to photograph a bird if that birds coming back flying around with food and it keeps hopping around from branch to branch almost in a circle you are not going to the nest then you know that you're disturbing that bird and in that case you need to back off a bit maybe back off to a point where you view with binoculars to make sure the bird is going to the nest nothing you should do should interfere with the natural behavior of the subject if you love nature as you should do because you've got into wildlife photography then I'd really urge you to learn as much as you can about the subjects you're going to be photographing not only is that going to help you reduce disturbance and stress to the subject but it's also going to help you photography because the more time you spend watching a wild bird or animal the more you're going to learn about its habits the more you're going to understand what it's going to do next and that's going to help you photography probably more than anything else. So please do take that seriously and always put the welfare of the subject first so I really do hope that those tips have helped you out if you're a beginner and you're just getting started in wildlife photography.