I’m culling through thousands of images this morning after returning from a week of photographing birds in Texas. Our Texas bird blind workshop once again produced incredible shooting opportunities. I shot about 30,000 images this year, including many pre-release capture images, trying to capture some birds in flight. For most of my wildlife photography I shoot at 20 FPS…plenty fast for most of the wildlife I encounter. And 20 FPS also works well for many birds in flight…but not all of them. When it comes to getting the beautiful wing positions, 20 FPS may not be enough.
Nikon, Canon and Olympus offer a pre-capture function that allows you to actually go back in time (1 second for Nikon cameras) after hitting the shutter so you don’t miss the bird taking off. This feature is critical in not missing the action. With Nikon’s pre-release capture you have a choice of many different frame rates including 30FPS, 60 FPS and 120 FPS. At 30 FPS you have a full size 45MP jpeg file, at 60 FPS you have at 19MP and at 120FPS you have jpegs at 11MP. IF you want to learn more about how to set this up in your camera, here is a link to an article I wrote for Nikon.
Obviously we want as large a file as we can get for printing, but I have seen many photographers on our workshops hesitant to use the faster frame rates and smaller file sizes. One topic is shooting JPEG versus RAW. It’s true RAW files give you a lot more latitude to edit, but I am fine shooting JPEGS. Just make sure to get your exposure right so you don’t have to do major edits later. 19 MP is plenty big for most of my end uses, and even 11MP works for magazine use and medium sized prints. I’ve seen my 24MP files printed at nearly 4×6 feet at trade shows in the Nikon booth, they look terrific. You may need to res up (enlarge) small files if you are printing really big. But don’t let smaller file sizes prevent you from shooting at these incredible fast frame rates like 60 and 120 FPS. Better to get the picture with a small file size than not get the picture at all!
Texas
The trick becomes knowing what frame rate will work best. In Texas we started calling birds by their frame rates…the kiskadee was a ‘sixty bird’, the cara cara a ‘thirty bird’, and the Inca dove was a ‘120 bird’. Bird wing movement varies from species to species, and from behavior behavior. I found photographing a cardinal worked fine at 30 FPS, I captured beautiful wing position as the bird was taking off. Pre-release capture made sure I didn’t miss the takeoff.
The big surprise was the small Inca dove. These doves don’t just take off, they explode from a seated position on the ground…gone in a blink of an eye. To capture beautiful wing positions I had to shoot at 120 FPS. Experiment with your own bird in flight photography and see what frame rates work best. You might be surprised the beautiful wing positions you capture at 60 and 120 FPS.