Best Autofocus Settings to Photograph Birds in Flight. How to get the Best Results with your Camera
What are the best camera settings to photograph birds in flight? This is a question I've heard so many times from dozens of photographers. Each photographer has their own opinions on the matter. Well, in this week's video I'll show you how to know what settings to use on your camera to get the best results. I'll be using a Canon R5 for this example, but this information and these techniques can be applied to any camera.
Over the years, bird photography has become a bigger part of my wildlife photography journey. I've had so much fun photographing countless different species and especially enjoy photographing birds in flight. This week, I'll share with you my method figuring out which settings are best in specific scenarios, all this with some recent examples.
As always, I thoroughly enjoy learning from you and hearing what you have to say. Let us know in the comments, what you think and how you determine which camera settings you use while photographing birds in flight.
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This is a very interesting video. Of all the ones I’ve seen regarding birds in flight, none get so far into the different options regarding Cases! Very interesting. Thanks!
Thanks so much for the feedback, I hope this video was helpful!
So much to think about with these amazing cameras!
Thanks for teaching this old dog some new tricks. Honestly there are a lot of things in the menu I don't understand or didn't but now I will have to experiment some more!
Thanks Julie! It's definitely time well spent learning about and adjusting various settings in your camera. Photographing birds in flight has become so much more enjoyable for me than it was years ago, largely because I'm getting better results than I used to and I attribute a lot of that to practice and just learning about my camera.
I wish there was a way to switch between cases using a custom function assigned to one of the programmable buttons instead of having to go into the AF menu. That way as the subject and behavior change you could quickly switch to the optimal case.
I'm not sure what you're shooting on, but on Canon cameras you can assign different autofocus cases to your custom shooting modes. So you can have case 1 assigned to custom 1 (C1), case 2 for C2, etc. This is a good way I've found to do things and you might give it a try. There may be even better ways of doing things, but this has worked well for me. I'd love to hear your feedback if you decide to give it a try. Thanks so much for the input!
Last spring was my first season of bird photography. The herring run up the river to spawn here in my town and for about six weeks the Osprey, Great Blue Heron and Bald Eagles know it's time to eat! I got some decent pictures I was proud of but I had a LOT of missed shots. I'm using a Nikon D7200 and a Nikon 200-500 zoom lens. The herring and the birds will be here in about six more weeks, can't wait! :)
Wow, that sounds like an incredible photography opportunity! I'll be curious to hear how this year's run goes for you. What a perfect opportunity to play with various settings and figure out what works best on your camera. Thanks so much for sharing!
Thanks for great tips !
Thanks so much for watching!
Thank you, Jimmy. Simple yet effective explanation of use cases and fine tuning. I sometimes notice that my camera struggles in complex scenarios, so I don't hesitate to manually pre-focus. In other situations, it is better to switch to full manual focus. I often get better results this way than if I keep trying to make the autofocus work (my camera doesn't have animal AF). Cheers!
Thanks so much Cláudio, I always enjoy your feedback and input. I manually focus in really difficult or extremely cluttered situations. But I've never been able to do so and get great results with Birds in flight. That's a whole other level of skill!
Actually I use manual focus mostly when birds are close to many branches and the camera struggles to find the subject. I suppose this is much better now with animal eye AF. For flying birds I don't use manual focus, I prefer to select a wide area of focus. I agre with you that manually focusing flying birds should be a great challenge. But we shouldn't forget that the first wildlife photographers of National Geographic and other magazines would have used their long lenses without autofocus and without image stabilization. Those were the true heros! :-)
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for watching!