Timing is everything…
I’m a wildlife photographer, and this is one in an occasional series of posts about my favourite photographs. I’ll tell you how I took them and break down the shot into the idea, the location, the equipment, the settings, the technique and any post-processing.
As it happens, this shot has just been chosen as one of the finalists for the month of February in the Greatest Maasai Mara Photographer of the Year 2021, which means I now stand a chance of winning the overall title plus $10,000 and a five-night stay at Angama Mara...!
The judge was very kind in his assessment:
“Far too often we are set on photographing the larger, more glamorous, creatures of the Mara. This image tells a wonderful, easily overlooked story, of just one of the daily life-and-death battles that are taking place.”
The idea
I was on a game drive with Paul Goldstein near Kicheche Bush Camp when I took this shot. I was just talking to him about doing some bird photography when he suddenly spotted a few European bee-eaters flying around an old, dead tree.
We stopped and got into position to take a few shots. At first, Paul wanted me to take a few of his trademark ‘slow pan’ shots, and he advised me to use a shutter speed of around 1/100 of a second.
European bee-eaters are beautiful birds, and one of the good things about photographing them is that they tend to go back to the same perch. That means you have the chance of spending a bit of time with them and trying out different techniques.
One of those is the slow pan, and another is to try and catch the bird with its wings spread just as it lands. The way to do that is to choose a high shutter speed (1/1000-1/2000 of a second) focus on the branch and then fire a burst just as the bird comes in to land.
There are a couple of ways of making sure you press the shutter at the right time: either you frame the shot and then lift your head to follow the flight of the bird, or you ask your driver to give you the signal. I prefer asking my driver, and Charles was happy to oblige…!
For this particular shot, though, I wasn’t trying to do anything special. The bird was perched on a dead tree stump, and I just wanted to take a straightforward portrait. This is where I got very lucky.
First of all, I forgot to set my shutter speed, so I was fortunate that it was just fast enough (at 1/640) to freeze the bird in motion.
Secondly, the bee-eater was too far away for me to see exactly what it was doing, but I was lucky enough to press the shutter exactly as it tossed a fly in the air. And I mean REALLY lucky, because the fly ended up exactly in the middle of the bird’s open beak!
The location
Kicheche Bush Camp in the Masai Mara, Kenya, in January 2021.
The equipment
Nikon D850 DSLR camera
Nikon AF-S 800mm f/5.6 E FL ED VR lens
The Nikon D850 and the Nikon 800mm prime are my go-to combination for wildlife photography. I love close-ups, and I end up taking almost two-thirds of my pictures using this equipment.
I have another camera body, the Nikon D810, which I pair with a Nikon 80-400mm AF-S VR lens, but the sharpness is nowhere near as good, so I generally only use that for handheld shots such as slow pans.
The 800mm lens is very heavy and unwieldy, but it comes into its own when you want to take a portrait of either a small bird or an animal that’s relatively far away. The sharpness is great, and the bokeh you get in the background is generally creamy smooth.
On this occasion, I stood up in the safari truck and rested it on a beanbag on the roof so that it was nice and stable - it’s such a long lens that it effectively magnifies any errors in your technique, so you need to be very careful using it.
The settings
Auto ISO 250
f/5.6
1/640 of a second
800mm
Daylight white balance
3D continuous auto-focus [ie AI Servo if you’re a Canon user]
I had the camera in Manual mode with the lens wide open at f/5.6 and the ISO on Auto, which I normally do when I’m not taking any slow pan shots. However, if I’d thought about it, I should probably have set the ISO to my default value of 1/1000 of a second, just in case there was any sudden movement - which there certainly was!
The technique
As I say, one of the most important things to do when using a lens of this length is to make sure you have a stable platform. Beanbags are great for holding it steady, and whether you sit down or stand up for portrait shots generally just depends on where you need to be to get to eye-level with your subject.
Another vital factor is the direction of the light. In this case, Paul Goldstein was telling Charles where to park, so he made sure that the light was behind us.
It was a sunny day, so he wanted the bird to be lit properly without any unsightly shadows. That paid dividends - as you can see in this shot by the presence of a small but important ‘catchlight’ in the eye of the bee-eater.
A catchlight is normally just a reflection of the sun in the eye of a bird or animal, but it really helps to bring the eye to life. Without it, it can look very dull, so I was very happy that worked out as it did. In fact, the weather on the rest of my trip had been pretty miserable, so I was very lucky to get a bit of sunshine on the final day!
The post-processing
I do all my post-processing in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw these days, but the only thing I really needed to do was to crop the shot from landscape to portrait format.
After that, I only had two changes to make to this shot in Lightroom:
I clicked the Auto tone button.
I used a preset to change Highlight Priority Post-Crop Vignetting to -20.
And that would normally have been that. However, I recently came across the Topaz Labs suite of software, including DeNoise AI, Gigapixel AI and Sharpen AI, and I was impressed enough to become an affiliate. (You can get 15% off here!) As part of the deal, I got a free copy of all three programs, so I decided to run this shot through Sharpen AI.
Unfortunately, the Topaz programs don’t work with Nikon RAW files with the .NEF extension, so I had to convert mine to a TIF file. The more pixels you have to play with, the better the results, so I started out with a copy of the uncropped RAW file. Sharpen AI has three different modes you can choose from:
Sharpen simply sharpens the image
Stabilise removes motion blur by adjusting for any movement of the subject or camera shake
Focus sharpens the image by effectively adjusting the focus point of the lens, either pushing it back or pulling it forward
It’s not easy to know in advance which of these modes will work best, so what I generally do is to put the Settings on Auto and use Comparison View, which divides the screen into four to show the original file together with the Sharpen, Stabilise and Focus versions.
By zooming in on the eye of the subject, I can easily see which one is the best. After that, I can play around with the Sharpness and Noise Suppression sliders to get the best overall effect. There’s even an Extra Noise Suppression toggle switch if you need it.
What’s most impressive about Sharpen AI is that it ACTUALLY SHARPENS THE IMAGE! This is not ‘sharpening’ in the sense of what Lightroom does. That’s just fiddling with the contrast to make the picture look sharp. What I’m talking about is actual sharpening, and by that I mean the removal of blur. If you’re not yet convinced, just have a look at one of the promo videos online - you’ll be amazed at the difference!
Anyway, my ‘Fly Bee’ image was a little too soft for my liking, and using Sharpen AI helped to make it tack-sharp while removing the very slight noise in the background.
For the purposes of comparison, here’s the original RAW image.
The conclusion
My trip to Kicheche was very enjoyable, but I wasn’t very happy with the pictures I’d taken. I took this shot of the European bee-eater on my very last game drive, so I felt a lot better about myself afterwards! There was a lot of luck involved in taking it, but at least I had the right settings and did the basics well enough.
As Gary Player used to say, “The more I practise, the luckier I get…!”
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