I am planning on going somewhere to do some wildlife photography later this year and it is something that I am not great at. So, I have been trying to get practice with the wildlife that lives around me. I do have a lot of great (not so wild) wildlife photos of napping dogs around my house, but to get subjects that are a little less cooperative I went down to a city park with a pond on Sunday morning. I tried this pond a couple of weeks ago but it was cloudy and the soft gray light coming from every direction eliminates shadows and makes the photos look kind of flat to me. But on this Sunday morning the sunlight had a chance to shine directly on the park.

When I got to the park, there were two ducks napping on the shore of the pond and some coots swimming around too far out in the pond to photograph. I saw a few whistling ducks fly over, but they did not land at the park. So after a bit of wandering around the pond to see what was available, I settled on a park bench near the napping ducks with the sun behind me and too the left. I think it is important to have the sun behind you to get good light on your subject, but not directly behind you or lose definition without some shadows.

While the ducks napped, I sat on the bench without even taking my camera out of my backpack and just enjoyed the morning. I saw water snakes swimming around in the pond; a turtle popped its head out of the water, saw me, and bolted; and there was a tree full of grackles squawking to entertain me. The ducks eventually woke up and decided it was time to get in the water and look for food in the mud, I guess. So, I got out my camera and put on my long lens figuring that I wouldn’t be able to get very close to them. Then they swam over to the shore about 3 feet in front of me and hung out there. I guess they don’t mind people. Ducks always look so happy, don’t they?

Another issue I came to work on had to do with camera settings. For landscape photography, I generally have the focus set to single-point with single-servo auto-focus. This means the focus area is the smallest square possible on the sensor and the camera focuses once on where ever you place this square and stays at that point which is great for an unmoving landscape. For moving wildlife, I changed to continuous-servo but had been leaving it on single-point. With continuous-servo, the camera keeps trying to maintain focus on the point as you are shooting to hopefully track the animal. I have had a lot of blurry results with this method and in thinking about it, I decided I need to try more focus points. I think that with wildlife, I am not able to consistently hold the small single-point focus box on the subject while shooting, so often the camera loses the subject and focuses on whatever is in the box and thus, a lot of missed-focus

So, on this morning, I used area auto-focus meaning that there is a rectangular area over the middle part of the image sensor and the camera will try to find a subject in this box. You can set the box for different sizes and move it around, I decided on a smaller size and to keep the duck’s head in the box. This does rely on the camera to decide that the duck’s head or eye should be in focus and so I have trust issues with this. There are fancy new cameras that have bird’s eye (or mammal eye) autofocus capabilities, but my camera doesn’t have that feature. It can find a person’s eye or a dog’s eye, but not a duck’s eye. So, I needed to learn to use area auto-focus for wildlife shooting with my camera.

Now, I will say that the perfect sunlight and the cooperative ducks really helped with the above photo and that is about the sharpest image I can get with this lens and camera. The duck is so close I actually had to zoom out quite a bit. The duck was digging around in the mud looking for food I guess and when it popped its head up I had to be ready to take a few quick portrait shots. I also held the camera low to the ground to try to get on eye-level with the duck to make it more intimate.

In the portrait below, the duck is so close that it actually limits the focus depth of my lens, but the eye is still very much in sharp focus if the bill isn’t. These are much better results than I have been getting trying to use single-point auto-focus. I don’t know why I have been so stubborn about changing. Perhaps this blog should be titled “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Trust Wide Area Auto-Focus.”

Using area auto-focus is not perfect. If the subject is amid clutter like grass or leaves the auto-focus might lock onto the wrong thing, though this was remarkably rare in my experience at the park. I have one photo of a grackle that was behind some grass in which the camera’s auto-focus locked on to the grass instead of the bird (see the image below). But that is a pretty tough test for auto-focus that doesn’t have bird-eye detection.

Animal close-up portraits are great, but it can also be nice to capture other types of wildlife photos. Like, behavioral images capturing the animal doing something interesting. For birds, this usually involves the flapping of wings. Or an environmental image capturing the animal with their environment as a backdrop as this can tell a bigger story. But, since I was using a long lens and the ducks decided that they wanted to be near me, I got a lot of close-ups. I guess next time I will go for the environmental type shots.

Modern cameras generally have really good auto-focus capabilities and in most situations you can just tell the camera generally where to look and it will find the subject and focus on it, though it isn’t perfect. I have a tendency to want to manually control every aspect of the image if I can and this has actually been holding me back. I think I have a little more confidence in camera features like auto-focus after this experience and hopefully this will improve my keeper rate with wildlife. I will still have to worry about things like light and composition though or I suppose it wouldn’t be photography. Thanks for reading.