Wildlife Photography in Zoo.

The richest animal in beauty.......The animal is a king of jungle.....Are you interested in wildlife photography? Yes but you cannot go to Wildlife safaries....If you live in a city that has a zoo or a wildlife park, you will get the opportunity to photograph the great tiger....If you live in a small town or village, have one time during the year, particularly winter, to visit the city having a zoo, you will get the ample time to shoot and preserve the pictures of the tiger and other animals, birds, reptiles and a nice pictorial view of the jungle.

To take picture in the zoo, you are well equipped with a compact with 4x zoom, a prosumer with more longer focal lengths e.g. 10x to 36x...With a DSLR you will need a long focal length zoom as 80-200, 70-300mm etc.and a stable hand as it is difficult to move with tripod amongst lot of visitors, the children and elders running to have a look, if the tiger is near the fencing....With zoomed at 300mm, you have the benefit of having the fence almost invisible and a  15 to 30 feet distance is good enough to have closeup views of tigers..The cheetahs are cunning and rather more dangerous animals of jungle at close range and are generally kept apart and in cage...so difficult to photograph....Doesn't matter just have a higher ISO of 400/800, to obtain higher shutter speeds and aperture of f5.6 when the tigers move fast, here and there....You may be lucky when there are more than one, thus you can have more shots of the animal in different moods......as his every posture speaks.....

In the picture the tiger was in the shade in a local zoo focused at 300mm using 1/500 at f5.6,ISO 400...In dSLR  you can move to ISO 800 and 1600 Though at ISO you may need some post-processing if there is less lighting.....

For compact users, set your dial on Auto, zoomed at 4x (as your camera has-may be 3x or 5x even) and it will set shutter speed,aperture and ISO required in the available lighting, may be under sun or in shade and squeeze the shutter gently....

Bird in action--see exposure and write-up.

Photography needs creativity as well as entertainment sometimes to get your mood fresh....That comes to what u now photograph or what you have already photographed, or what you are planning to photograph...hahaha...not long expectations....If you see this photograph, this is good at composition as a casual shoot, i.e. off centre....Yes, I was passing through this place and captured some good moments of this water-greedy creature.....They swim well and it is great to photograph them with water reflections....If you are creative and eager to learn, the ''middle of the road'' approach.....that is in saying---do not go practically but in thinking and capturing the mood of the picture....Going sideways will do, but not always, as you improve your technical skills.....Learning than mastering, the two approaches to the goals will make you fit to take great pictures.....

The bird was shaking its wings, and here high shutter speed will work well....If you go more slow, you can capture the wings not freezed but in motion (even at this shutter speed they show some motion-compare the face and wings, in sharpness)....That will make a good picture, if you hold your camera well and having a feather-touch shutter release,without blurring the bird.

Expo: 1/400, f5.6, ISO 200.

Macro Photography, Easy Tools---(Post No.70).

Previously also you have seen 'macro' shots put up here....there are variety of subjects, immediately close to you or away, where you have to go according to lighting situations...e.g. in summer, the noon is a difficult time...or in the evenings when temperature exceeds 40 degree Celsius....Rains and winter are good months for macros.

In India we have the benefit of round the year sunlight in comparison to Europe or other western countries.....Besides MACRO photography is one of the easiest subjects, which can be practised anywhere, if you have patience and eye for detail...The subjects may be leaves with textured details, insects, flowers and their stamens in local park, your kitchen gardens, which many photographers rear to have regular look for different insects.....

For beginners,student of photography, enthusiast learners, the useful tools, I like for MACRO photograhy are, EXTENSION TUBES, LENS REVERSAL RING, CLOSEUP LENS FILTER, (Macro lens is a costly affair unless you are a regular macro photographer)....Besides above, the compacts, and Prosumer d.cameras which have 1cm to 3cm focusing capability....and the Kit lens of a DSLR having 5" focus with 3" of coverage area....Later you can magnify more your subject in your computer or laptop in Photoshop.

More to tell .......this time I again chose an indoor object with focusing on mono of the watch, with a different angle and side lighting with a good contrast of yellow and white....Just try.

Expo: 1/40, f2.8, ISO 100.

Dust-storm Sunset.

Sunset is an excellent subject for all photographers....Yes I include you too the new camera persons and I feel you too do not miss it when you go for travelling on holidays as summer vacations, vacations in December and for some it is round the year. It is a subject of Nature photography...Sunsets give the exceptional look with water i.e. rivers, lakes, sea etc. Even good photographs are taken with small and large ponds.....Many people do not have this approach. But you cannot avoid sunsets in plains, or distant hills, mountains, moreso with great bunch of trees...haha..any good location will work, as long as you try to achieve good colours the atmosphere renders when the GREAT LORD is at the horizon in the evening.....include the clouds, spreading between good sunrays...Best of all, good closeups are also essential as you have some long focal length lens.....However, as you have computer or laptop, try in low ISO (YOUR MANUAL SAYS THAT THE ISO RATINGS) and crop the image as a magnification of sole sun, so you can enjoy a full view of sun with yellow, orange, red colours...if cloudline is there, far better.

The picture above was taken in a duststorm occured in March covering mainly north India....The sun made a good halo effect.....I made it slightly more colourful so you can have a gaze at it...hahaha....Light was dull, therefore I kept  my camera on Av mode.which read very slow speed for the atmosphere and the sun, the aperture too was wide enough.

Expo. 1/60, f 4.8, ISO 200

Shooting at higher ISO.

Birds are generally be known as creatures of habit. This is particularly true during the breeding season, when they will be driven by impulses to come back to the same spot time and again....The bird photography is a part of nature and wildlife photography....I also have posted bird pictures here and this or any subject may come again with a different outlook.

However, if the birds are acquainted with the people and place, you can shoot them at 20 to 30 feet on trees/electric wires....Electric wires? Yes a common habit of these creatures as they are closer to tree branches......You need some study of their habits, if you see them in the morning and evening in localities. But give preference to bird's interests I mean not disturbing them. As you have longer focal length lenses on your camera it becomes easy.

As I captioned Shooting at higher ISO, IT APPLIES TO BIRD'S PHOTOGRAPHY, WHEN IN FLIGHT, particularly in evening low light, so you can use higher Shutter Speed to capture the bird as it arrives, or takes off, or in slow flight (to ease camera to focus and trigger)....As in the picture above the bird takes off and was more than 100 feet away from camera and sun was going down, I used ISO 1600. Though if you cover full frame with the bird, the noise is less disturbing, but when it comes to longer distance and cropping the bird to magnify it....in higher ISOs, the noise will be  apparent in the picture. This is so because, using lower ISO and SS, u may blur the picture....I waited for this few minutes having the eye in the viewfinder looking each side of frame and, lo, as it took off, pressed the shutter....My intention, this may happen sometimes, not to miss picture at any cost, yes at the cost of grains and heavy cropping because of longer distances....The tree was nearly 60ft high....You can imagine, bird 60 ft  from ground and 100 ft away from camera and not to miss. At 1/2500 the wings are still faster....Handling on tripod was difficult as more one or two birds kept coming and clicking them too, but the wings are difficult to catch...as they cover the face of the birds while moving....so it is sheer luck to be trigger-happy...haha... to share with you people here...This is satisfaction.

Expo: 1/2500, f6.3, ISO1600, at 300mm.

Centre of Interest in a Silhouetted pic.

Do you shoot without caring for some simple outlines of composition....As we get a cloth stitched for our dress, we are careful about its correct fitting-in case of shirts for men, we are conscious that the pocket should be at left, so we can take out the pen/diary easily by use of right hand, since there is sufficient space to move our hand to the left pocket, rather than having the pocket at right---right plus right is equal to difficult handling of things in right side pocket......

This photo I put up to let you have understand of focal point or centre of interest...For example, in the picture there is an empty boat, where the attention goes immediately, because there are other boats with people in them.....Here it is reverse, generally we expect empty boats and a boat with people in it to attract our attention....or even a single boat crossing the sunlight and you may say, wow what a silhouette picture......so also here is beautifully spreading of light onto the lake and people are enjoying boating, while we see an empty, haha, unfortunate boat with no passengers in it....that is the point....I explained both ways....You will more enjoy taking pictures in lake, river, or sea, making good silhouettes.

Expo: 1/4000, f6.3, ISO 800, Aperture priority.

Flower with fire......?

Last month I have gone through an article to lighten the flowers with backlighting...giving an edge over normal shooting. This indicated using an off camera flash, which will be throw light from back....creating rim lighting effect, thus keeping the subject detached from the background....Yes this technique is effective in many types of photography. You must have observed the good effect of side lighting or backlighting from the high powered halogens on stages, be of marriage, or of theatre...Good examples can be viewed in TV serials using two to three types of lighting.

Here the flower, though not backlighted on the petals, but has a fiery effect in the middle,bright orangish instead of whole pink, which is the natural colour of flower....I took this picture three months back and while reviewing, I found the total different effect we generally see when photographing flowers from front.....Only thing was that THE FLOWER WAS SLIGHTLY UNDEREXPOSED ON MY AUTO SETTING....There was half portion of wall in the background and half flower leaves. Since the flower was underexposed the leaves took to dark while the wall white-grey was distracting the attention. Therefore I used vignette effect on the photoshop. The result is almost full attention in the middle to the beautiful pink edges.

Expo: 1/100, f.2.8, ISO 200.

Not to be specific....shoot full.

We are generally feel it obligatory to focus on only one subject.....This is natural as in Portraits, Flowers, Birds.Wildlife,Still life,even Sunrise and Sunsets......While sometimes picture offers good opportunity to capture it in full, as there are lot of elements, necessary to be shown from a wide thinking point of view....Yeaa, we cannot ignore the full atmosphere before us, when we have camera in our hand.  On this spot, as I saw, lot of people had cameras and mobiles and clicking the near and dear ones.....To capture the shot in wide view will help u to remember the whole scene, whether you were on motor boat, on cruise, or on the boats, even when you see it even after 10 years....

The picture had a  lot of important elements, as the guys in the foreground, just enjoying, people  moving for fun on the platform, ladies and gents, the waiting persons for motorboats in coloured jackets, left side orange, right side green, the motorboat approaching the platform, the cruise too coming to its halt, more boats in the lake and coloured boats in foreground......it is an evening shot, so the picture depicts dull atmosphere, with ready -to-rain clouds....There is the balance in composition with the coming motorboat at left and cruise at right--foreground to middle-the stationary boats & people and the dark sky above centres the attention in the middle, interestingly the far city horizon also an important part of story.

Exposure: 1/60, f5.6, ISO 800.

Still life - Grapes with transparent bowl.

When you see something usual, you do not go to photograph it, as u understand that this is a mundane subject....No subject is mundane....You treat it photographically....since it is all a play of light and shade....Yes good still life pictures can be made in home itself. There are a lot of things....If you have a light source, best....otherwise morning sun or evening sun at an angle can be used....Next, besides sun, soft objects can well be photographed under shade in verandah or any other place, camera mounted on tripod, if shutter speed goes slow.....There are good chances to use ISO 100 to 400....making the pictures in normal way or applying low key or high key lighting.....As in the picture, bowl looked important to me, therefore I wanted to show the top outline of this transparent bowl with the grapes spread out.

Light was low from a reflector, therefore, I exposed at 1/20, f5.6,ISO 400....WB ambient light.

Birds-photographing is not easy.

Tamed birds are easier to photograph....or if you visit 'Bird Sancturies', with your tele-zoom/lens, you can find good pictures as the birds are within the reach of your cameras's tele end, since they are habitual of humans watching them....Next is their perching place....They can be found on tree branches, on the ground, on walls, on electric pole or wires...In this way they are moody.....One photo I recently watched was the the stork making its nest on the electric pole and the pic was from Greece.....Yeaa, the home-bird as 'Goraiyya' makes its nest on the upper portion of your ceiling fan in verandah....I keep water and rice or beans on the boundary wall but they do not come....hahaha, there is the inevitable danger of the Pussy Cats, who frequent the places outside homes. The birds also fear their life.....In the picture, the two mates came on the boundary wall of a nearby house....still they were away from my 300mm. I shot pictures as above, but had to crop them, in order to magnify them.....The background is not natural, as u can imagine the position of boundary wall....There is another house.....The exposure is a problem with light colour boundary wall and bird's dark face...Therefore I manage with Aperture priority, plus EV + or -........Just try.

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