Monday, September 26, 2011

Owls in the Melaleuca tree


These owls were in the melaleuca tree in my parents' front yard a few nights ago. My mother held a flashlight on them while I took some photos. To capture them, I put my camera on a tripod and I used a 75-300 mm telephoto lens, and I used relatively long exposures, (this one was 1/4 of a second), and I turned up the ISO setting to 6400. The ISO setting is basically how sensitive to light the sensor is, and 6400 is really sensitive, so you can expose the sensor to light for just a very short amount of time, and hopefully get a good photo. However, these high settings can cause grainy photos.

Canon doesn't let you use the ISO 6400 setting right out of the box if you get my camera, a T1i, I think because they felt it was too grainy. The T2i and T3i have better performance at this setting, and so the manufacturer feels the 6400 and 12800 settings aren't up to their standards on the T1i. So you have to go through some custom settings menus to even find these settings with my camera.

Fortunately it wasn't windy, if it had been then the long exposure method wouldn't have worked. I considered using the flash, but decided not to, as I thought the camera was too far from the owls for the flash to make a difference. I was probably wrong about this. With the high ISO setting, I could have got the owls exposed something like the way I got the tree in this photo using the flash. I took this photo about three hours after the first owl photos, because the owls were making a barking sound. I could not find them anymore, only hear them.



No comments:

Post a Comment