Cockatoo

I promised yesterday that I’d bring you a portrait of a good-looking bird as today’s image (as an antidote to Opera House centric Sydney images), but I suspect some readers may be somewhat disappointed to see that I literally meant a bird.  Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw that one coming a mile off.  Well, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, this cockatoo was photographed in the Botanic Gardens, as the sun was setting, in circumstances that made it difficult to get a well-lit photograph, so I settled for just a photograph.

The difficult circumstances were due to three factors that I had little control over – the subject’s movement, the subject’s mood and the setting sun.

It was the setting sun that caused the lighting issues because it meant that the subject (and indeed the gardens around him) was in shadow, while the sky behind was still being lit by the sun.  Exposing for the subject meant that the sky was overexposed.  I did have the option of using the pop-up flash to add a little fill flash from the front, but opted not to for reasons that will become clear.

The subject’s movement was a problem in two respects – he (or maybe it’s a she – I’m not sure how you tell) was constantly moving because he was feeding and not only was he moving constantly, but he was moving constantly towards the camera. That meant that I would need to pay special attention to my focusing to get an in-focus shot of him, and to the shutter speed to avoid motion blur.

Focusing was via continuous focus mode, with the Nikon D700′s 3D tracking capability and it did a reasonable (but not perfect) job.  As I chose to frame the shot with the camera practically on the grass I was using the camera’s Live Mode for composition – this allowed me to see exactly what composition I was getting without needing to look through the viewfinder, but it comes at the cost of a delay between squeezing the shutter and the shot being taken. That delay not only affects the framing, but also delays the point between focus being locked and the exposure being made.  Without an easy way to frame the shot from the angle I wanted to shoot at I had to live with this.

I handled the problem of motion blur by using a fast shutter speed – 1/2000s – which I achieved with an increased ISO, and a relatively wide aperture.  A narrower aperture would have helped with focus, but I did want to through the background out of focus, and wasn’t too pushed about the cockatoo’s body being in focus if his head was.

This shutter speed was one thing that ruled out the possibility of using fill flash to allow me to hold the sky’s exposure.  Had I wanted to use flash I would have been limited to a shutter speed of 1/250s, and reckoned that it may not be sufficient to freeze the bird’s movement, such was the erratic motion of his head in particular.

A bigger reason not to use flash was the subject’s mood – or what I perceived to be his mood, which would best be described as “grumpy”.  It was probably fair enough – afterall he was trying to have his dinner and there I was with a camera stuck in his face.  He took a few attempted pecks at my lens in the run up to this particular frame, and I didn’t fancy antagonizing him further with a burst of light from the pop-up flash.  That mood also meant I didn’t really get a whole lot of time to get the frame I was after, so when I saw him look into the lens for one of the exposures I decided that was good enough for me and moved on towards Mrs. Macquarie’s Point a short stroll away to get a photo I had in mind for the previous few days.  More on that tomorrow.