Camera Settings For Photographing Wildlife

Pin It Occasionally I like to try something different in my photography so when recently I read through my Nikon camera manual and noticed the wildlife settings I decided to head to a local park and see what results I could get. I always read the manuals of my cameras from cover to cover as there's always new ways of doing things added regularly.

I had some success using the manufacturers wildlife settings and the adjusted noise of the shutter (see the video) works surprisingly well. I strongly suggest you dig out your manuals and see what secrets the camera holds. Have fun!

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Photoshop Magic

Yesterday was my birthday and a great friend of mine, Emma Duggan kindly made the effort to
come up and see me for the day. Emma's also a professional photographer who has a similar but also differant style to her photography. Emma Kindly bought me the coolest and most perfect birthday card ever (see picture here) how cool is that!

As i'd promised when she arrrived (late as usual) we went to the park and I introduced her to my favourite photography props. We spent a couple of hours feeding and shooting the squirrels.

We had a great laugh and left the park when it started to get dark. We then set about playing with the images in photoshop.

One of my complaints about shooting digitally is how flat the pictures tend to be when they come out of the camera compared to film. Emma showed me some neat quick tricks (look at the differance between the two shots here) to getting the images to wake up which I will now use all the time.

Having sorted out the photoshop we went for an Indian and set the world to rights. I always find when two photographers meet up and start chatting its like nothing else. It's as if you live in a foreign land and you suddenly discover someone else who can speak the same language! Hours and hours of great conversation.

After the meal we went back to my house and started what was supposed to be a little run through on how to use flash, and how to have fun with it. I won't go into too much detail but we ended up at 2 in the morning, with stands, tripods and multiple flash guns scattered throughout the house. We then set ourselves the challenge of working out how to get a person in the same photograph twice in differant positions without photoshop. After many nearly attempts and stumbling around the house in complete darkness between flashes we finally got what we were after. GREAT FUN !!!

Keeping the Photography Props Happy !

Pin It One of the greatest joys I find when working outside for portrait photography is nature itself. About 18 months ago I was walking through a local park looking for good backgrounds for a shoot I had planned for the following week.

Whilst I was in the park I noticed the squirrels searching for food, I began to wonder how brave they were and set about a plan to turn them into photographic props.

For two weeks I would turn up leave a large pile of nuts and fire off my camera (no film) just to get them used to the sound. Soon they began to associate the noise with food and completely lost any fear of the noise (and by this time attached flash).

I now decided to take them a stage further and started to feed them by hand whilst firing off the camera. It took a while but the larger ones soon realised I wasn't a threat and began to feed eagerly.

Today they come running when they hear the camera shutter, so much so that I have to avoid that area of the park when I'm working until I'm ready for them. They work fantasticly and the kids love it totally forgetting about me and the camera allowing me to capture some fantastic images.

I try not to over use the squirrels as I believe it's important that they continue on their daily lives searching for food rather than relying solely on me. But for those occasions when I want that extra special portrait with a young child who may be a bit shy or a special bridal image, they're unbeatable.

Yes it's taken a while (over a year) to get to this stage but now we have a great working relationship and I don't know of another photographer in the UK / World who has props like I do. Personally I much prefer something like this to a studio ultra boring white background shot, but then again everyone has differant opinions.