Digital Diversity

For a person that enjoys taking wildlife pictures, I have had very few chances to actually do this as of late. In fact I have been mostly limited to shots of the family dogs, the birds in the park and the squirrel that feeds in the tree outside the front of my house. What I really wanted is an opportunity to spend a few hours dedicated to practising my photography on various creatures. The problem is mainly finding the time. Fixing up my house, planning for my wedding (well I cant take too much credit for that one), work and many other things, I was finding it hard to set some time aside.

Then last sunday my fiance had arranged to spend a good part of the day at a wedding fair with my future mother in law. Seeing as I had no plans of my own I decided to visit the local zoo and see what I could capture.

Before I set out I planned what I would take, how I would shoot the shots and made sure my memory cards were empty and batteries charged.

Kit check:
Panasonic lumix fz28 (18x superzoom bridge camera 28mm – 486mm equivilant)
Battery and spare
TCON-17 – 1.7x teleconverter plus adaptor ring
Camera bag
Re-attach neck strap (I often just use a wrist strap)
Filters – just incase
Lens hood – also just incase
Formatted 16gb card plus spares

With the kit ready I needed a plan of action. A small sensor camera like the fz28 is limited when it comes to image quality. You dont want to go above ISO 200 unless you really have to. I wanted my images to be as sharp and detailed as possible. For this reason I would be sticking with aperture priority mode with ISO set to 100. I would check my shutter speed at each animal enclosure with a half press. If to slow I would try and increase it by either upping the ISO to 200 (maybe 400 but I really don’t want to) and adjusting the exposure compensation. Under exposing a shot not only increases the shutter speed but also means less chance of blown highlights. It would however mean more image noise to contend with, but that could be fixable in post processing as long as I stick to lower ISO’s. I would be shooting in RAW. This would allow me the maximum amount of detail to be retained to give me the best results in post processing. It would also give me greater ability to fix poorly exposed shots. I would also be using spot focusing mode so that I could precisely focus on the subject where I wanted to.
(more…)