I shoot in aperture priority which means my shutter speed often fluctuates wildly as the brightness of the background and setting changes and as the bird moves into and out of light. This series is a good example of that. Notice how my shutter speed increased from 1\/3200 to 1\/5000 as the harrier began to get more bright sky behind her. If she had dropped down lower instead it would have placed more dark phrags behind her so my shutter speed would have plummeted. Where a bird will fly of course cannot be predicted so my high ISO’s and resulting SS’s give me some necessary wiggle room.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nBut sometimes there’s a price to pay when shooting at high ISO’s – excessive noise (grain) in the image and I paid that price in this series. I’m noticing more noise in the darker background in this series than I usually do. It isn’t bad but I do notice it.<\/p>\n
But I’d rather have sharp shots that are a little noisy than soft photos with little grain. That choice isn’t even a horse race but like most photographers I’m greedy and would prefer the best of both worlds.<\/p>\n
That’s one of several reasons I’m currently researching new cameras.\u00a0 Better noise handling capabilities would be a welcome improvement.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n\n- In some folks essential tremors is an aggressively progressive condition that negatively and drastically affects their lives. In later life Katherine Hepburn’s very obvious head-shaking was caused by essential tremors inherited from her grandfather and Daryl Dragon of Captain and Tennille fame was forced to retire from music because of his tremors. Thankfully mine are less severe, aren’t particularly progressive and only affect my hands, at least so far. My paternal grandfather, father and two sisters also had (have) essential tremors to varying degrees.<\/em><\/li>\n
- Yes, I know. If I were to switch to shooting in manual or shutter priority rather than aperture priority it would mitigate some of my problem with noise. But that would bring it’s own set of challenges and I’m a creature of habit who’s comfortable with shooting in aperture priority. I know it well, to the point that it’s integrated into my muscle memory, so I won’t be changing.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ok, it’s past time to fully address the elephant in the room when it comes to my photography.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[338,6,334,341],"tags":[49,4879,4883,86,4882,3491,146,178,4880,4881,234],"class_list":["post-79744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-northern-harriers","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-camera-settings-for-birds-in-flight","tag-captain-and-tennille","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-daryl-dragon","tag-essential-tremors","tag-flight","tag-hunting","tag-iso-and-shutter-speed","tag-katherine-hepburn","tag-northern-harrier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/northern-harrier-9745-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-kKc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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