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Post by grizz1 on Apr 3, 2014 20:45:12 GMT -5
No spring break for us when in school either and I was one that could have used it, never cared for school until I was out for about 10 years. Hated history and now it is a favorite subject.
I was thinking the same thing about the buzzards, bet exposing those black bodies enough will blow out the sky. At least I can practice tracking them to see if I can keep up. How do you set your focus points, single center or all that your camera has?
Don't know why there are so many here, for some reason they have always roosted 3/8 of a mile behind my house in a thicket of Cedar and Oak. They nest there too and may be as many as 200 early morning and late evenings. There is a large power line that passes through the center of this thicket, double poles with cross arms at every pole set and early mornings the buzzards will gather on these cross arms until it is too crowded and hold their wings out with their back to the sun. I'm not sure if they are warming up or drying off, they even do it when it is pretty dang warm. There is another roosting area about 10 miles South of my house near a lake that has mature white pine and Oak trees on it's South shore, very thick also, there are more there than at my house. There is a fine restaurant overlooking the lake and folks watch them come in to roost as they dine on fine food and drink wine. Many of them think they are majestic Hawks or Eagles having no idea what they look like close up.
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Post by Kt29 on Apr 4, 2014 15:59:23 GMT -5
lSteve, I think with all those buzzards around roosting, I would spend a little time with them. I'm guessing one could come up with some interesting pictures. When I shoot birds in flight, I generally use the center focus point only. With all the mountains that I have to shoot in, multiple points just don't work all that well. Shooting in a more open area could benefit using the multiple points. Usually have to shoot on manuel also, so to attain enough shutter speed, which in most cases is at least 1/1250. The faster the better for birds. My biggest drawback is shooting over 800 ISO. My camera gets pretty noisy after that. Pretty windy and rainy out now.
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Post by grizz1 on Apr 4, 2014 23:07:48 GMT -5
Thanks for the pointers Terry. Never even thought about the mountains but now I see that as a problem. I should be able just to get high on a hill and shoot against the clear sky. My camera seems to do decent with high iso, around 1600 still good unless cropping is above 50 to 75 %. I can get under these buzzards and shoot nearly straight up I'm guessing as close as 100 feet high and up to 300 feet. With the 500mm there shouldn't be much cropping if any.
I had no idea what to start the shutter speed at but will start with 1250 and see what happens. We just can't get blue skies here this year and that would help me gain shutter speed, lower ISO, higher f stop but I'll probably have trouble with exposure and blow out the sky. Looking forward to trying though.
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Post by Kt29 on Apr 5, 2014 22:18:46 GMT -5
I think that shooting those buzzards will be a lot of fun Steve. I use 1250 as a minimum. Shooting faster if you can is always better. To try and get as much sharpness as one can, I like to shoot over F7 if possible. Have fun with it, and post a few pics , when you can, of them.
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Post by grizz1 on Apr 5, 2014 23:37:59 GMT -5
Well I had a nice day, blue skies and not a bird in sight. In the late afternoon 4 of us decided to ride the ATV's, check food plots etc. so I take one camera with the 18-135 lens on it. At the East farm I was running around 20 mph when 20 or more buzzards flew over, some were lower than the power lines, went for the camera and never got a shot, start moving and a Turkey crosses the road in front of me. Never took a pic of any birds or animals all day, I'm going to have to plan this more and work a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, my methods used today do not work.
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