Another first time user of the D2X

You're off to a great start, Jim! You're gonna love this machine! Be patient and shoot, shoot, shoot. The hardest thing for me is still trying to keep birds in flight within the hsc markings. My longest lens is the 300 and then I usually use a 1.4 so I need to shoot hsc to fill the frame (of the resulting picture) better.

If you don't already, I'd recommend you shoot the birdies in manual. Frank got me hooked on that and I don't shoot any other way now. It builds your exposure confidence so you can focus (pardon the pun) on other things while shooting, like getting the bird tracked and in focus!

 

Nice series James. It looks like your going to enjoy that new camera.

Thanks for sharing.

 

Well if your initial work with the D2X is any indication you are off to a wonderful start. Very nice images.

 

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The last one is the one I like the most.

 

Excellent start with your new cam James. You already have some very good images. I predict that you are going to love the X.

 

Congratulations on the new XXX and wonderful images.

 

Great first shots it is a fantastic camera isn't it, cant wait till I get more comfortable with it

 

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wonderful captures. I look forward to your future ones as you get to know the camera better.

 

Hmmm... Maybe I haven't been shooting in conditions where the light is frequently changing. You know Florida, it's mostly always just sunny. But what I've found is once I settle on a combo of aperture and shutter speed, do my test shots (getting to a point where I'm just under where I get blinkies), that whether the flying bird is shot against the blue sky, cloudy sky or foliage, the bird is always properly exposed. The backgrounds may vary accordingly but the bird never seems to blow.

These setting work for snowys, egrets and ibis, but I have to repeat the process when trying to get properly exposed shots of little blues, tricolors, cormorants, vultures, etc. Some days, I've had it where I can shoot one white bird, give the aperture dial a quick turn a few clicks then rapidly shoot a darker bird. Lately what I've settled on is shoot just white flying birds, change, then shoot darker birds and switch back and forth. It's more relaxing that way.

Hope that has answered your questions. All I can say is it has worked very well for me. I guess my proof has been, when I've posted some shots, the various comments about the exposure being good on the white birds.

 

I went back and checked a number of shots of mine of white birds. I checked egrets against "black" water, foliage, bright blue sky and cloudy sky. Some were in direct sunlight, others were in overcast light. Some were at 1/640 f8 @ ISO200 and others were 1/800 f9 @ ISO100. There were some variations in other shots.

Using these values or at least in that area my whitest-whites never seemed to go beyond 230s. I did try to increase my f-stop so I could get better depth of field but only rarely was able to get past f9-10-ish. I'm still a little leary of noise cropping up as I see it show up during sharpening. When that happens then I just use a layer mask and paint on the sharpening. I'm pretty comfortable up to ISO400 but generally like to stay around 100-200. I haven't really tried shooting birds above 400 so please don't think I'm saying above 400 is too noisy...I just haven't played around with that high of an ISO yet.

 

James,

Kevin's reply is spot on. The reason that you shoot manual is so that the changing background doesn't fool the camera into over- or under-exposing the birds as they fly from sky background to tree or water background. You have hit on one problem with this though, and that is manual doesn't work nearly as well when the light changes rapidly (cloudy to sunny, or sunlight to shadow). For those situations, I still use A mode, and just ride the EV comp.

As for the aperture setting for big birds, anything less than f8 is going to cause the wingtips to be OOF. I have shot geese and GBH's as low as 5.6, and still gotten decent results, as long as you center the head and body in the DOF, but I wouldn't go any lower than that.