Reciprocity in photography is where if you make one change to the exposure triangle – shutter speed, ISO, aperture – then you have to change one of the others by a corresponding amount to compensate for it. So if I have an exposure value of 1/125 sec, f4, ISO 400 and I want a shutter speed of 1/1000 then I’d either have to open the aperture to f1 or increase the ISO to 6400 or a combination of the two. The problem with wildlife photography is that it is often done in low light and has a need to use fast shutter speeds as the critters won’t sit still for very long. It is surprising to see how much a bird moves while sitting on a stick. This was my problem the other day when I returned to Northam to have another go at getting a photos of an Australian Spotted Crake (Porzana fluminea) . 

 

 

As regular readers may remember in a previous post I said that I didn’t have a long enough lens for my usual Micro Four Thirds camera – the Olympus EM1x. My lens is a 100-400mm which gives me a reach of 800mm in 35mmm full frame terms. The lens won’t take a teleconverter and even if it did that would entail a further loss of light and image quality. So after some thought I decided to use my Canon 80d and Sigma 150-600mm lens which would give a reach equivalent to 960mm. Not a lot more but sometimes you’ve got to take all you can get. So with that we headed off to Northam and I sat on the river bank waiting for that elusive little spotty bird to make an appearance. My big problem was light – well to be more precise the lack of it. I warmed up with shots of a Common Sandpiper with an exposure value of 1/200, f6.3, ISO 10,000. I was lucky as the Sandpiper was content to sit still. When I did finally get a glimpse of the Australian Spotted Crake it was in deep shade so I had to drop the shutter speed to 1/60. I couldn’t open the lens up any more as I was wide open and I couldn’t use a higher ISO as I’d reached the limit. I shot several bursts in the hope I’d get at least one sharp image. A quick look at the rear LCD panel gave me a bit of hope for a result. By now the bird had taken itself back into the undergrowth not to emerge again. After waiting for a while we continued walking down the river to see if anything else was about.

 

 

 

 

 

Getting home and looking at the photos none of the images of the Spotted Crake were sharp, there was motion blur and grain the size of golfballs. I tried every trick I know to try and rescue the images. But, as my dad used to say “No matter how hard you polish a turd it will always be a turd”. That flipping bird has become my nemesis. On the positive side I did get the nicest images of a Sacred Kingfisher that I’ve ever taken.