I am new here and apologise in advanced if this is an overly rehashed subject but I'm curious to know what settings are commonly used by bird photoraphers here. My self I have settled in to the habit of leaving my Canon 7D with 400 5.6 lens on Av or aperture priority of F7.1. This seems to be the minimum I can get away with though if a bird is facing yoward or away from me and I am close I will still get one end out of focus. I also have the camera set to 1000 or 1250 ISO. This may seem very high but I do most of my shooting on my country property which lies at the edge of cloud forest at 2100m and only occaisionally get full sun. When I do it's often at an hour when the birds are sitting quietly in deep woods. (I would like to mention as an aside that here there is a huge difference in bird activity between cloudy overcast days when they are active all day long, they especially like fog and bright sunny days when they're scarce as hens' teath.) Occaisionally I visit a low land marsh reserve where there is almost always bright sun and I can crank the ISO down. However I have a friend who generally leaves his Nikon on the running figure "action" setting and gets many excellent bird photos. So what are the settings that others of you use for birds?
Are you using AI servo mode with one AF point (+AF expansion is OK)? If the light is constant, as it usually in in cloudy/foggy conditions, manual exposure is the method many use. Some use only the center AF point. I vary the AF point to position on the eye and the composition I want.
Your Camera Settings For Bird Photography?
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