IdzieJul 28, 2024

Seeking advice from more experienced photographers (especially of birds/bugs/nature!): one of the biggest things I'm struggling with is exposure, and specifically getting very overexposed bird shots on bright sunny days. My googling and reading of various articles have contained a lot of contradictory advice which leaves me where I am, which is not knowing what settings to change when I'm encountering this problem and feeling really frustrated. So I thought, there's lots of great photographers here, why not ask?? What's your advice? What settings do you use in bright sunny conditions of direct light? What am I doing wrong?

For context: I'm shooting on an old Canon rebel T3 DSLR with Canon's lowest end 75mm-300mm lens. EDIT (further context) I'm very new to using manual settings on a camera and have mainly been shooting in aperture priority mode while trying to get the hang of aperture/ISO/manual focus, but clearly I need to expand beyond this ASAP to get the shots I want.

Thanks so much for any advice or insights!

#photography #birdphotograhy #naturephotography #photographyadvice

Show threadRoss Grady
@idzie I think the T3 has an auto bracketing mode where it will fire a 3-shot burst at different exposures: https://support.usa.canon.com/kb/index?id=ART111495&page=content

The downsides are: the shot with the optimal exposure may not be the best composition, and letting it bracket for you doesn’t necessarily help you learn.

The upsides are that if you review the EXIF data later, you can start to get a feel after the fact of which settings actually produced the result you like, and learn that way.
Canon Knowledge Base - How to use Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) on the EOS REBEL T3.

Jul 28, 2024 at 2:27pmWeb
Show threadRoss GradyJul 28, 2024
@idzie the other thing I tend to do when shooting small things is to always keep metering and focus set to a small spot, and then do the half-press trick to lock in metering and AF on exactly the spot I want, and hold at half-press and then reframe as needed for composition.
Show threadIdzieJul 30, 2024
@rossgrady oh thank you, that's a good tip