Eric Browett

Eric enjoys travelling, hillwalking, motorcycling and, of course, photography. His pictures have been widely published, including on the cover of Gardeners’ World, and he has enjoyed success in multiple rounds of APOY. See his profile on www.photocrowd.com

RETIRED teacher Eric Browett was given a camera (a Nikon D3100) as a leaving present from the school he worked at, and it reignited his passion for photography. He enjoys shooting landscapes, but his main love is wildlife, particularly birds of prey. He currently uses a Nikon D7100 and, for wildlife, an 80- 400mm lens. ‘I shoot raw + JPEG, and if I’m out all day I occasionally use the dual memory card slots so that when one card is full the camera will automatically switch to the second,’ he explains. Eric favours the manual exposure mode, but also takes advantage of custom settings. By saving the settings for static birds and flying birds to separate controls, he can switch between them easily. ‘I need to be able to alternate between AF single and AF continuous quickly,’ he adds. ‘I use back-button focusing on my custom settings for moving subjects – it’s a real game changer.’ For static wildlife, Eric aims for an aperture of f/5.6 or f/6.3 to throw the background out of focus, and lets the ISO fall where it may. When shooting moving subjects he keeps the aperture wide to facilitate fast shutter speeds, and shoots 6fps using the continuous drive mode.

The grass could have been distracting if it was in focus, so Eric used an aperture of f/5.6 to blur the environment around the buzzard Nikon D7100, 80-400mm, 1/320sec at f/5.6, ISO 100

Keeping the ISO on Auto (and allowing it to rise to 1800) has allowed Eric to use a fast shutter speed and freeze the movement of this little owl Nikon D7100, 80-400mm, 1/2500sec at f/6.3, ISO 1800