Photography Q&A
QA lot of my birding is done in woodland, but I really struggle to photograph birds such as Nuthatch and Treecreeper well because on a sunny day light levels change all the time. Do you have any tips on how to cope with this effect of sun coming through the trees (I use a Canon DSLR)? K Drummond, Aberdeen
AChanging light can certainly be tricky but there are solutions. We would advise shooting RAW and shooting slightly under exposed and correct the ranges of high, medium and low exposure ranges in post edit. You could also try exposure bracketing, which shoots 3 shots at varied exposure, or high dynamic mode, which shoots 3 images at varied exposure for each shutter press. High Dynamic can slow the image taking down so using this will depend on the subject movement. Both exposure bracketing and High Dynamic mode will also require post editing.
QThis going to sound like a silly question, but I recently got a Nikon P1000 and started photographing birds – are the principles for taking good videos the same as for taking good photos? P Burnside, Littlehampton
AThe Nikon P1000 is capable of high-res 4K video and can shot this at 30p, or 30 frames per second. This would be great for perched or nesting subjects where you are not needing to rapidly move the camera. If you want to record moving or fluttering subjects then a higher frames per second will be needed, which will mean reducing the video quality. Like with photos, exposure and focus are very important with video but in some cases even more so due to it being continuous motion vs a single image.