Nikon D700, 70-200 VR with 1.7 Teleconverter at 290mm, 3200th @ f/5.6, ISO 500
Thanks to everyone for their kind comments about the Red Kite shots from a couple of weeks ago, as promised I thought I’d better post a bit more on the technique and equipment behind the scenes.
You might think that we used shutter priority to select a fast shutter speed, but I was worried that with contrasting low light in the background the camera would select too large an aperture, and the bulk of the bird may be thrown out of focus. So I used aperture priority, adjusting the aperture between f/5.6 and f/8, and using the ISO speed to get a quick enough shutter speed to make the Red Kites sharp. For much of the day I was able to use ISO 320 to get a shutter speed over 100oth of a second, but at times I went as high as ISO 800. Fortunately the D700 makes such choices academic.
