My Photography | Nature Snaps with my Telephoto Lens

As the weather brightened up a bit this weekend I took this as the ideal opportunity to take my camera out into my garden and photograph the wildlife. Along with the sunshine, quite a few birds came for a visit too so I made sure to use my telephoto lens and had a practise at photographing them. The results weren't particularly great though, I got some nice shots but they're not fabulous. I find that despite using a 300mm telephoto zoom lens, I still can't get close enough to the birds in camera. I have to sit fairly close as it is but ideally I'd like to get even closer, however this isn't possible without frightening the birds as my lens doesn't seem to zoom as far as I'd like.

Here is the first shot I took...

©2014HannahBennett

You can see that the quality of the image is pretty poor, it's not a very smooth image at all. I've cropped into the original (seen below) quite a lot and I don't think the focus was sharp on the bird either which has resulted in this unclear image. I am pleased with the composition of the bird though, it looks like he's peeking round the cocunut shell which is pretty cute! I'm also aware that the background is quite cluttered too, it's extremely difficult to get a nice background in my garden without including the orange fence.

ISO Speed:ISO-400
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/125
©2014HannahBennett

Here is the original image above, as you can see, I've cropped into the bird to try and remove a lot of the background clutter, i don't like the stray twigs in the background and the hideous dull grey pole of the bird feeder running along the left hand side is extremely distracting as well. I also forgot to use a form of flash to add a catchlight to the birds eye, a tip I learnt through a book I read a while ago by Guy Edwardes, called '100 Ways to Take Better Nature Photographs', which you can find here if you'd like more info about it. Because of this I used Photoshop to add one in by selecting the brush tool, making sure the colour was set to white, then I zoomed in to the eye and added a tiny little circle, recreating the effect of a catchlight. In the image below, I've added the extract from the book where Guy has enhanced the eyes of birds in his images. I created my own version of this technique using his example for guidance.

©GuyEdwardes

I have another shot from my mini garden shoot which I am going to do a post on so look out for that, it should be coming sometime throughout this week so keep your eyes peeled!

See you then