The BEST way to get pin sharp shots for wildlife photography!

Unlock the Secret to Pin-Sharp Wildlife Photos: Mastering Autofocus Settings on Your Camera!

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Hey everyone! In this week's episode, we're gonna dive into the autofocus features of Canon mirrorless cameras. But don't worry if you have a Sony, Nikon, or Fuji mirrorless camera—you gonna find similar functionalities there too. By the end of this video, you'll be able to grab your own camera manual and easily cross-reference all the stuff we are going to talk about. So, let's get started! 

So, one thing that got me talking about this topic was some feedback I got on a video I posted a few months back. In that video, I mentioned that bridge cameras can be pretty expensive considering their limited features, which all started when Nikon dropped a new bridge camera. Some folks thought I was picking on Nikon, but that's just not true! Right at the start of the video, I made it clear that my thoughts apply to almost every bridge camera out there (I'm talking 99.9% of them), no matter what the brand is.

Some assume I'm a big-shot photographer with high-end gear. In reality, most of us, including myself, aren't wealthy. We need to be smart about our purchases and avoid spending thousands of pounds on sub-par equipment. Recently, I recommended a more affordable mirrorless camera and lens combo that can outperform a Nikon bridge camera for just £150 more. Today, I'll demonstrating on my Canon R5, but that offers features similar to the budget-friendly R50. Pair the R50 with an 18-300mm lens, and you have a solid wildlife setup for enthusiasts.

Let me fess-up—I'm not a wildlife or bird photographer by any means. Honestly, I can only identify the usual suspects like pigeons, sparrows, and robins. But here's the thing: I know my way around a camera. So, even though I'm no expert, I still manage to get some pretty sharp shots of those zippy little birds!

Let's dive into the Canon menu system, which has five or six sections. Today, we're going to hang out mainly in the purple AF (that's auto-focus) menus. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with every single menu item, just the juicy ones.

So, let’s get started with the first AF screen. Here, you'll see AF operation. You get two options: One Shot or Servo. One Shot is perfect for snapping static objects, like those beautiful landscapes. It lets you lock in a focus point and it stays right there until you focus again.

Now, Servo is the way to go if you've got something that’s moving. It keeps focusing on whatever is under the focus point when you press the shutter. This is super handy for action shots. But, heads up! Without pairing it with other autofocus functions, you might end up with some out-of-focus images. So, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen, shall we? 

Alright, let's talk about the AF method option next. Now, this depends on your camera model. So, if you have something fancy like my R5, you're in luck! You can use the Face Tracking method, which is great because it detects and tracks faces—whether human or animal—using a little square focus point. And get this: if there’s no face around, it scans the whole auto-focus area to lock onto your subject. But, don’t worry if you’re using a budget-friendly model like the R50 that doesn’t have this feature. The Whole Area method's works almost as well! It covers the entire focus area to make sure you still get that perfect shot.

Next one down is the  Subject to Detect menu! This camera's got three options: People, Animals, and Vehicles. Plus, some of Canon's newer models even recognise sports like basketball and soccer. When it comes to animals, this feature can spot dogs, cats, and birds - pretty neat, right? So, we're gonna go ahead and use that  setting for our camera

Now let's talk about Eye Detection! This cool feature uses AI to find the eyes of your subject. Now, for us humans, our eyes are right in front, but for birds, they're on the sides. So, it's super important to turn this option on to get those perfect shots! 

The final option on this screen is Continuous AF. When it’s set to Enable, once the camera has locked on the eye of a subject it will continue to shift the focus to this point. Now this option isn’t available on the R50, but if you set up back-button focus which I talk about in this video and keep your finger on the button you set to be the focus button, you will get exactly the same thing happening.

So, the R5 comes with four extra screens on the AF menu that you can play around with, but honestly, you don't need them to snap some amazing wildlife shots. But hang on, because we do have a few more settings to tweak before you're all set. 

Let's start with Shutter mode! Head over to the red menus on page 6. So, by default, your camera’s set to Mechanical. What does that mean? Well, it means the shutter physically opens and closes to let light hit the sensor. Now, here's the thing about mechanical shutters—they have to  reset after each shot and shoot fewer frames per second compared to some of other options.  

The electronic first-curtain shutter, mechanically opens up but then uses electronic control to stop light from hitting the sensor. Now, the full electronic shutter takes it up a notch—both starting and stopping the exposure electronically. No moving parts here, which means insanely high frame rates! The R5 can hit 20 frames per second, and the R50 isn't far behind at an impressive 15 frames per second. If you want to max out that frame rate, make sure you're in Electronic shutter mode.  

If you want to capture those fast-action moments, you need to shoot in fast bursts here's what you need to do! First, hit that m-fn button. Then, use the back dial to pick Drive Mode. Now, switch it by using the top dial to select High-speed continuous shooting + mode. And you're all set for some rapid-fire photography! Let’s head down to the garden and see how we put these settings into action. 

Okay so here we are we're just looking out into the garden and I have the camera trained onto a bird feeder which I have just at the back of the garden. I'm shooting with my Canon R5 set up as we've just discussed. I have my 100 to 500 millimetre lens on here with a 1.4 times converter so it gives me a good reach all the way out to the back of the garden.

So what we need to do next is to set up the camera so we can ensure we get some really sharp shots when taking our pictures. These birds that we're going to be shooting today are sparrows, tits, robins, yeah so they're going to be coming in quite quickly so we need to set a fast shutter speed which is going to freeze the motion of the birds. So let's dial in a shot speed of say four thousandths of a second.  

Okay in terms of aperture I'm going to set my aperture as wide as possible. Two reasons. that's going to allow as much lighting as possible but it also gives us that nice blurry effect that you hope to get when you're shooting wildlife photography. Because I'm using 1.4 times converter on this lens the widest aperture I can get is f10 but you'll see because it's a long zoom and relatively close to where we're shooting that restricts or reduces the size of the depth of field so we still get a nice blurry image behind the pictures.

As you can see at the moment the picture looks pretty dark you can hardly see anything at all in the in the frame and it's because we've not got enough light coming in so we need to balance the exposure now and the way we balance the exposure is by increasing the ISO value. So let's increase it until we get to about one stop below. the light meter reading.

OK, so you can see this is a fairly high ISO value. Now I'm not going to be too bothered about this. Wildlife photographers particularly don't really care about having high ISO values. They'd much rather have a noisy image, which has got a sharp image of a bird, rather than having a blurry image with a very low ISO value. And then I can apply noise reduction through software later on when we're taking the picture. So all we need to do now it is set up  and ready, we just need to wait for the birds to arrive.

This is one of the things about wildlife photography, you've just got to wait for the birds to arrive. I'm sure they must be hungry, it's lunchtime. So, where are they?

So as we shoot the birds, we keep our finger onto the shutter button and it just keeps on taking images and it's going to latch on to the eyes as the birds come into the scene. So you can see there's quite a lot of movement happening at the moment and it's looking really good in terms of what we're capturing. You'll see as it comes in, again it just switches straight onto the eye of the bird and we get some really nice sharp images or hopefully we get some really nice sharp images as it comes in.

One of the benefits of shooting with an electronic shutter is that there's no sound coming from the shutter. It's totally silent so that doesn't scare the birds away anyway at all. So let's take a few more shots as birds come in and we can see how sharp the images are, what to take them into room to edit.

You saw then, as the birds came in, the autofocus locked onto the eyes of the bird and then, if we keep our finger onto the shutter, it keeps firing at images and we get pretty sharp pictures of all those birds as they were coming in. So you can see as the bird came in, it just locked onto the focus, onto the eyes of the bird and if we keep pressing the shutter button, it's going to remain focused on that position and then as the bird disappeared, we get really nice sharp pictures of it in flying motion. And hopefully you saw that time as that bird came in, it latched onto the focus straight away.  

So I think we've got some great images there. I'm going to go away and process them now in DXO Pure RAW 5 and you can see the end results.

So I hope you enjoyed seeing how this autofocus system works really well to get really nice sharp pictures of birds.

If you found this video helpful, do me a favour and hit that like button and share it with your buddies – it really helps me reach more awesome people like you! And, don't forget to subscribe to my channel by hitting that button below. My website subscribers get a monthly newsletter loaded with cool photography tips and exclusive deals. You can sign up just by scanning that QR code right there.

I'm Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and thanks for hanging out with me on Coffee Break Photography. Can't wait to catch you next time!