Malibu Spring and a Fast Shutter

Today was a beautiful day in Malibu! Spring is in full force.  It was bright, warm, and hardly any clouds in the sky. A perfect day to shoot some high speed photographs and test some equipment before I fly out to Africa in a few weeks for my photo safari.

So I grabbed my camera and went to play.

Now when I say high speed photography, I'm referring to shooting with a very fast shutter speed. Since it was really bright out today, the conditions where very good for high shutter speeds. It was a good change of pace for me since I don't often shoot high speed.

Here are some shots I got and the specs behind them....

The Heron above was shot in Manual Mode at: 400ISO F-5.6 and 1/2000 sec.

This image was shot using a panning method with the following details. Manual Mode,
400ISO F5.6 and 1/1000 sec. 

The images of the birds where quite challenging actually. I'm testing out a new lens I bought to use on a second camera body when I go to Africa; the Canon 70-300  IS lens. I used this lens today and I was happy with the test results.

Most of my shots today were of birds. I quickly learned that if you want to capture the bird in mid-flight you better be using a fast Shutter. Now you can probably notice that I shot at 400ISO and 500ISO. The reason for this is that the extra ISO speed allowed me to use an even faster shutter speed.

Remember, a fast shutter speed allows less light to reach the camera's sensor because the shutter opens and closes so fast. The higher ISO gave me the ability to speed up my shutter speed, but at the sacrifice of more grain in the image. Grain doesn't bother me these days because most higher end D-SLR's now shoot up to 800 ISO at very acceptable standards.

On my walk back from the beach, I came across a patch of spring flowers. Of course, the flowers where beautiful, but what caught my attention were the bees that were hovering around them. I was pleased with the test image results of the bird photos so bees seemed like a real test. After all, they are tiny and they move really fast. So for the next 20 or 30 minutes I photographed the bees. And since I was practicing my high speed work, they made perfect subjects.

Here's a series I captured....

All of the photos above where shot with the Canon 70-300 IS lens. The images where shot at 1/2000sec, F-7.1, and 400 ISO.

As you can see, even 1-2000sec is not enough to freeze a bee's wings in flight.

It was a fun afternoon of actually playing with my camera and lenses and not necessarily "working". Hopefully these images will inspire you to go play with fast shutter speeds and the season of Spring! -cg