Photographing Wildlife

One of the challenges of nature photography is working with what is at hand. Sometimes you cannot get any closer to the subject. Some animals are very sensitive to people and you can try and camouflage or just stay back. In the case of the hummingbird that I was talking about the other day is that the hummingbird was a bit far away.  This photo was taken with a Canon 30D with a 100mm – 400mm and even still I had to crop to about a 1/4 of the image.  Hummingbirds are even more challenging because of their size and rapid movement.  It is a good idea to find something hey like to feed on and then stay put and let them come to you. The first thing to keep in mind when confronted with these challenges is to:

1. The overall activity of the animal in this case a very active and beautiful bird that is very photogenic
2. Try to keep composition in mind
3. Some images you may not want to crop so keep the artistic image in mind
4. You will need to make sure you have an image stabilizer if you want to crop
5. A tripod if you do not have image stabilization (probably should use a tripod any how)
 

When you crop images they have a tendancy of getting a bit grainy looking.  There are a few tricks to help correct this.  One is Neat Image.  It takes the image and and fills in the data that is missing giving the image a cleaner less grainy look.  It is a very inexpensive as well.  You can also use other software to enlarge the image so information is not loss and then crop but still may need something like Neat Image to clean it up.