Shooting Red Kites; Tips Please

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Any quick simple tips for shooting red kites flying driectly above? I'm very very unlikely to be on the same level as them. I'm using a Nikon D80 and the Nikkor 70-300vr lens. I had a go and the results weren't good :help:
I've been using the set up with the iso turned up as i find the lens at the 300 end needs it. So i'm looking for tips on white balance, focus mode,etc
Cheers (y)
 
one of the biggest problems you get shooting birds against sky is that the metering sees all that bright light and compensates for it, making the bird itself very dark or merely a silhouette.

One way of getting round this is to set the aperture and ISO you want to use, then take a meter reading from the camera off of the grass, this will give a shutter speed to choose, change the camera to manual and set all of these settings, manually, this should expose the bird correctly, but may over expose the sky a bit depending how bright the actual sky is. Depending where you live, you may well be able to get above or at their level by climbing hills etc, i know this is possible in Buckinhamshire and Oxfordshire and Wales in some locations.

A lot of its trial and error, but tyou should not need high iso to get good response from a lens, you may have to stop it down from the max aperture or max zoom though to get the best results.

Hope that makes sense, and is of some help anyway :)
 
As above, see if you can get up any hills.. or..

If you know roughly where they are nesting you can sit it out and wait for them to fly in and out.. they don't nest very high and are slow at getting out of the nest itself so plenty of time to focus on them ready for flight!
 
Set D80 to auto ISO
White Balance to Sunny
Matrix metering
I would use single or a small group of central focus points (usually 9 on the D300)
Adjust EV to between +1 and +2 (depends what the weather is like and how good the light is) but this range should be in the right area.
Adjust "Focus Tracking with Lock On" to OFF (its a4 on my D300 menu) this will allow focus to adjust the instant the subject moves.

Plus all what Ian said above, you can opt for the expose of the floor method Ian describes.

I tend to shoot in manual, with auto ISO that allows me to set the bits I want control of like shutter speed and aperture, the camera can adjust the ISO to suit.

You ideally will need 1/1000 (certainly above 1/500) and try for around f7.1, this will give a greater depth of field, which is useful if they are close, and will give a bit of tolerance on focus.
 
Shooting in raw has a real benefit as you can still tweak the exposure.

This one for example (from last week at Bellymack):

I tend to rely on the alter EV route as I can do this without taking my eye from the viewfinder and the subject, however it is always a best guess, but +1 to +2 is the ball park.

Now these birds were also dropping away, twisting and turning so on occasion fully lit by the sun, so it would have been easy to over expose those, which is why I preferred the flexibility of being able to instantly adjust using the EV button (learn which it is on top of the camera, and practise adjusting it on the fly so it becomes second nature).

I know 3 clicks of the command dial is a full stop EV so it is simple to learn, just learn to take in the info that is in the viewfinder.

It may seem a lot to grasp, but is simpler than it sounds...good idea would be to go practise on some Gulls or other common large bird.

Anyway this was shot as described above, at +1EV, it was still a tad dark so I adjusted the raw image a further 1/3rd of a stop.

D-Red-Kite.jpg
 
thanks for the advice martyn, hopefully going up to gigrin/llandeussant in the next few weeks

drew
 
Cheers guys. I got some similar pics to Martyns, the other day but the noise was horrendous, probably due to the iso. I knew there was some way of blowing the sky to get the detail, but wasn't sure what it was.
Some great advice.:clap::clap::clap: I'll go away and play and hopefully come back with the results.(y)
 
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