WildShots

Learning wildlife photography – When to use manual focus

Posted on 11. Mar, 2009 by Paul Burwell.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know that I’m a big advocate of using your camera’s autofocus system whenever possible. While there are better and worse autofocus systems and the debate as to whether Canon/Nikon/Sony/Olympus/Pentax have the best autofocus performance will go on forever, in reality they all have very useful autofocus systems that will usually achieve very acceptable results. There are however, a few circustances where trying to use autofocus will cause more problems then it solves. Read on to learn how to solve this issue…

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Photoshop Tutorial – Sharpener Pro 3.0 by Nik Software

Posted on 04. Mar, 2009 by Paul Burwell.

In this Photoshop tutorial, I take a look at the Sharpener Pro 3.0 plugin from Nik Software. During the video presentation, I work on sharpening the same image for the web/email, printing an 8″ x 12″ print on an Epson 3800 printer and preparing the print for printing on an offset press on coated paper. Like everything we do here at WildShots, this tutorial…

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Learning wildlife photography – Making sharper images – Part 3

Posted on 06. Jan, 2009 by Paul Burwell.

Learning wildlife photography – Making sharper images – Part 3 – In this final instalment on making sharper images, we’ll discuss a few more things to think about when you’re trying to make the…

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Learning wildlife photography – Making sharper images – Part 2

Posted on 05. Jan, 2009 by Paul Burwell.

Making sharper images – Part 2 – In the last post I discussed some of the finer points of using your camera’s auto focusing features to help compose an image and get what’s important (the eyes!) in focus. Let’s look at some additional factors that go into making sharp images.

Lenses – The higher quality the lens, the better images it can produce. And unfortunately…

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Learning wildlife photography – Making sharper images – Part 1

Posted on 02. Jan, 2009 by Paul Burwell.

Making sharper images – Part 1 – A lot of wildlife photography is dependant on the use of telephoto,telephoto-zooms and super telephoto lenses to make reasonable images of small subjects or larger animals off in the distance. When you use a telephoto lens, you need a new set of techniques in order to ensure that you end up with sharp images. Nothing is more frustrating than…

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Sharp images with a 2.0x teleconverter???

Posted on 10. Dec, 2008 by Paul Burwell.

Hang out in the various discussion forums on the Internet long enough and you’ll eventually come across people talking amongst themselves about how a 2.0x teleconverter (or extender as Canon calls it) pretty much ruins your chance for making tack-sharp images.

However, I beg to differ.

I regularly use both my 1.4x teleconverter and my 2.0x teleconverter (and sometimes I’ll stack those to create a 2.8x teleconverter) and assuming I’ve got enough light to work with, I have no problems creating sharp images.

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