Emma Healey
Emma is passionate about wildlife, especially observing animal behaviour and capturing it with her camera. She loves creatures great and small and enjoys photographing insects too.
Her outfit comprises two Canon EOS R5 bodies, and her favourite lens is the EF 300mm f/2.8 used with an EOS R adapter.
Emma works for specialist tour operator Wildlife Worldwide and over the past year has led client workshops to Brazil, Zambia, Botswana and most recently to northern Greece to photograph pelicans. www.emmahealeyphotography.com www.wildlifeworldwide.com
Whenever I am leading a workshop, one of the first things I encourage clients to do is to get to know their camera and make it work for them. I think adjusting settings should be instinctive and you need to be able to alter them quickly by touch when the camera is up to the eye. It’s even worth practising camera handling in the dark. This will help you to get sharp pictures, as fiddling with settings wastes valuable time and risks missing the shot. In a hide, it means you can change settings quickly without having to turn on a torch to see what you’re doing.
I’m a control freak so I am always in manual exposure mode. I like to manually change ISO too but sometimes when there is a lot going on I will use auto ISO. In sunlight I use ISO 100-200 and change speed to suit the lighting, and my top limit is generally ISO 3200 at dusk or if the light is low. I am always checking the exposure readout in the viewfinder, and I would rather get a sharp and slightly dark image that I can adjust and fine-tune in editing.
On location, I invariably have the EF 300mm f/2.8 on my EOS R5 with an adapter and generally have an aperture of f/2.8-3.2 set. F/3.2 is my safe space and that’s fine so long as I get the subject’s eye in focus. However, I have been shooting a lot at f/2.8 for the effect it gives where the eye is sharp and the even more shallow depth of field makes the rest of the scene look quite dreamy. That is my normal approach but if I had a lion in front of me and I wanted its whole face to be sharp I would set to f/8. If I have the time, I would probably shoot at both apertures and pick the one I prefer later.
I’m lucky because I have steady hands so I can shoot at slower shutter speeds with no problem. I don’t tend to use tripods/monopods and find them restrictive because animals can move quickly and I don’t want to miss the shot.
The exception is when I’m shooting macro focus stacks, which I would rather do with a tripod when possible. However, I also do stacks handheld too.
I’ll sometimes use a slightly higher shutter speed than normal even in good light. So I’ll do some ‘safety’ shots at, say, 1/1250sec to make sure I’ve got some sharp ones before dropping down to around 1/500sec – this is even with the in-body image stabiliser working. Provided that it is reasonably still I can handhold the EOS R5 and 300mm f/2.8 at 1/100sec. I’m not happy at that sort of shutter speed but I will if there’s no choice.
My focusing set-up is for back button AF so I have the AF-ON set to activate spot AF and the AE-L button for wide zone AF with eye detect/tracking. I use servo AF and on the EOS R5 either Case 2 or 3: for birds in flight it’s Case 2, and Case 3 for animals running around.
I will usually use eye detect/ tracking unless I have a wild dog, cheetah or leopard in shot – these mammals have too many spots and confuse the eye-detect system so it’s best to stick with spot AF.
Canon’s animal eye detect was designed and developed for bird photography. It can often find a bird in a tree of sticks; it’s incredible. But you can have a leopard with big eyes in front of you and the eye detect will go to its ear or the tip of its tail. With a leopard, I will try eye detect first but if it doesn’t immediately pick up the subject’s eye I use AF-ON for spot AF and with the focus lever move the AF point to the part of the scene I want sharp. There was a firmware update that was meant to improve this but it still needs work.