Photographing White Birds on Snow

This week's video is a tips and tricks one. I am actually going to focus in on how to photograph white birds on snow!   I will be using my friend Astrid Kruse's little ceramic birds that she makes. It turns out that birds are not known for being where you want them to be when you are ready to film. Plus it's really cold outside.  It has been hovering at -30 and colder all week.  

Check out Astrid's work HERE. 

If you figure out what I'm going to paint for the next video put a comment below. :)  I recommend staying to the end of the video as I will be sharing some of the images that I have taken.  Let's grab our camera and let's get going.

You will notice that my shutter speed is going to stay the same all the way along at 2500.  I don't want that number to change through the whole process. The reason I used 2500 is that I am doing bird photography. Keeping the shutter speed very quick compensates for when they decide to move.  Birds tends to move fast and I want the image to be as clear as possible.
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What I'll be focussing on when we do this exercise is using  the ISO setting to modify the amount of light coming into the camera sensors.  ISO is the film speed.  In the old days we would get film that had an ISO of 25, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1600.  But now our digital cameras can have an ISO of 25,000 or higher, which can be amazing for really low light settings but also tends to be "noisy".  First I start with taking an automatic reading to get the cameras light exposure reading.  The moving indicator will land in the centre of the exposure value range which is at that 0. (scale below)

When I looked through the back of my camera via the little view finder I see a screen (image to the left).  First there is the shutter speed, then f-stop reading, the exposure value scale and ISO number. I generally like my f-stop to be about 11, 12 or 13, which is mid-range on the f-stop scale. I take advantage if the light is really bright to increase my f-stop reading to 22.  This will ensure that the I get the most in-focused information on the photo.  I only drop my f-stop to a 4 if I want everything to be out of focus except for the bird.  A narrow range will be in focus with the rest of the image out of focus.   

in the above image you can see each step that I go through in one place beginning with ISO 200 and ending at ISO 1250
Each ISO jump brought me into the "over exposure" range of the Exposure Value Scale.  

I want you to take a minute just to focus in on the shadows.  As you look at the range of images you can see how dark the cast shadows are.  Cameras tend to read the shadows as really dark compared to what our eyes can see.  I can have the bird at a perfect light reading but then the shadows tend to be too dark. If I then made adjustments for the shadow, the bird will end up way too over exposed.    The two images with hearts are the correct exposures: ISO 640 the ceramic birds are perfect and ISO 1250 is where the cast shadows are what my eyes were seeing.   

Often I will work with two very different images so that I can get the object expose properly but also the cast Shadow are the shadow area expose properly. 

At the end of the video I shared a bunch of images that I've taken from being overexposed, properly exposed to underexposed.  I would warn against photographing cloudy day when the light is really flat. On those days in the winter there is so much light bouncing around that it just flattened everything out.  You will notice it when you're walking as it tends to affect your depth perception.
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