Wildlife photography is one of the most daunting and challenging photography genres. An increase in the popularity of wildlife photography has been seen in recent years. There are many reasons behind this paradigm shift, which has diverted the attention of many photographers towards wildlife photography.
Firstly, the subject in wildlife photography is always changing since there are a variety of wildlife species all around us. This photography niche also lets you travel a lot, from as far away as Amazon to South Africa, to capture wildlife photographs.
To capture wildlife photographs, you need a compact camera with premium image quality, and you can’t ask for a better companion than the Canon 70d. The camera’s AI servo captures fast-moving animals and birds without any image distortion. Interested? Keep reading to learn more about the Canon 70d’s features.
The Canon 70d can shoot a continuous 7 frames per second at full resolution with its 19-point AF mechanism, allowing it to track a running lion or a zebra. The camera comes with a dual CMOS AF feature autofocus, which focuses accurately within split-second intervals. A variable-angle LCD allows you to change settings like ISO, aperture, and focus with finger taps on the touchscreen.
Wildlife photography is a refreshing experience, which allows you to marvel at the diversity of wildlife creations. To capture wildlife photography, you need a featureful camera like the Canon 70d with top-notch features to track moving subjects during the day and night.
Below, we’ve given you 5 tips on using the Canon 70d for wildlife photography.
Know Your Camera
It is vital to explore all the features of the camera before using it in the field. The Canon 70d is an advanced camera with simple buttons and settlings at the camera’s top and back. It comes with a moveable touchscreen capable of rotating in an upward and downward direction. The dial has been replaced with a smooth multi-controller to switch between ISO and mode settings.
The Canon 70d comes with three autofocus options, which include zone, point, and auto. You can select any of these options depending upon the subject in focus. The camera is equipped with Dual-Pixel technology. This, along with the incredibly fast autofocus (also available in live-mode view on the LCD), allows photographers to capture nocturnal creatures.
When used in live view mode, the articulate touchscreen helps capture wildlife photographs from different angles as well. It allows you to visualize a full-frame image from a macro photography standpoint.
The Canon 70d comes with dual settings for AF micro-adjustment too. You can either adjust at the end front or rear end of the zoom lens. It gives an added comfort to the photographers, who can use it either way, depending on their ease of hand movement and the length of the lens.
There is a dedicated button for Auto-focus available on the Canon 70d, unlike other similar Canon variants. The improved 19-point auto-focus points allow you to track and lock onto a subject.
When it comes to wildlife photography, you’re always in the field in remote areas to search for rare moments. The Canon 70d can help you in this pursuit, with its long-lasting battery life, which supports 1200 shots per single charge.
Get Low
The central idea of wildlife photography is to capture genuine photographs of wildlife species. You must capture rare moments of a wildlife animal hunting, sleeping, bonding, or grouping. The best way to do so is by getting on eye-level with your subject.
However, it’s also essential to protect yourself and your camera by camouflaging under the bushes or behind the trees. To shield your camera and touchscreen, you can encapsulate it in a metallic bracket to avoid scratches on the camera body while crawling.
The biggest challenge of wildlife photography is maintaining an unnoticeable presence in the middle of a dense forest. The tilted screen of the Canon 70d allows you to view the scene in the LCD while crawling silently towards the subject. The durable and weatherproof screen can be rotated up to 45-degrees in an upward and downward direction.
The touchscreen allows you to take full advantage of the histogram to verify the exposure of the photograph. If the histogram is concentrated on the right side, then the image is overexposed. If it is skewed on the left side, then it is underexposed. You must make sure the histogram is higher in the middle to ensure a properly exposed image. You can analyze the histogram in real-time to adjust the camera settings on the touchscreen.
The AI focus of the Canon 70d allows you to lock on the subject with a single focus point until the subject starts to move. The camera then automatically switches to AI Servo to track the moving subject. Such diversity allows you to capture rare wildlife photographs by maintaining a low-key presence deep in the forest.
Content Vs. Technical
Wildlife photography isn’t about capturing still photographs of the animals. It’s about creating a story that depicts the life of the wildlife kingdom. Wildlife photography allows you to study how animals in the deep forests live. Hence, your photograph needs to have a background context or a story associated with it. This is essentially what is known as content.
A lot of people debate over whether the content of a picture is important or the technical details that went into it. To be honest, you need to combine the content of photography with the technical features of the Canon 70d to create extraordinary wildlife images. It takes a lot of patience to capture just one photograph of a rare hunting moment, especially when you’re sitting for hours in the wild forest.
The evaluative is a default metering mode for the Canon 70d. It considers different aspects of the photograph, such as the subject in focus and secondary background objects, to present the best possible exposure value by weighing all these characteristics. The highlight indicator of the Canon 70d specifies different overexposed areas in your photograph. You can enable this feature before capturing the photos to keep track of the overexposed content of your images.
Shoot Up Close
The Canon 70d offers Wi-Fi connectivity allowing you to capture close-ups of the wildlife animals from a remote location. You can camouflage your camera in the bushes near the subjects, while maintaining a safe distance, to remotely view the image. In this way, you don’t compromise your safety and still capture close-ups of the wildlife species.
You can combine remote image viewing with the Dual-Pixel technology to capture photographs of animals that cannot be disturbed. The silent and seamless Dual-Pixel autofocus mechanism enables you to capture photos of crocodiles, insects, owls, and other wildlife animals in their natural habitats.
The Canon 70d allows you to use a combination of a wide aperture, a low f-stop value, and a fast shutter speed to track the movement of the wild animals. In this way, you can achieve a shallow depth of field by segregating the blurred background from the focused subject. The ISO sensitivity is directly proportional to the image exposure. The higher value adjusts the light exposure to a minimum value to capture a sharp and detailed photograph of the focused subject.
The Canon 70d is proving to be an efficient camera by ensuring minimum image noise even at higher ISO values in low light conditions. You can use semi-automatic modes like Aperture Priority (Av/A) or Shutter-Priority (Tv/S) to control the exposure of the photographs. You can manually adjust the aperture to control the depth of field and let the camera select the shutter speed or vice versa.
Use Light Wisely
One of the biggest challenges in wildlife photography is lighting. The animals don’t pose according to the external lighting conditions. So, you need to use light wisely, keeping in view timing. The best time to capture wildlife photographs is after the dawn and before the dusk. The time interval between 11 am to 3 pm is not very photograph-friendly because of the sharp sunlight, which overexposes everything in the photograph. However, an overcast during the day is quite favorable for wildlife photography.
The Canon 70d allows you to select the relevant ISO to capture an optimized exposure during the different times of the day. Suppose you try to capture Sandhill cranes after the sunrise or before sunset. In that case, it is best to select a high ISO sensitivity value. The recommended ISO value is 800 and 3200.
Light plays a vital role in image scaling or magnification up to 20×30 and beyond. During the post-image-processing, a lot of image distortion can be added to the photograph at 50% or higher zoom in value. The trick is to capture wildlife photographs earlier in the day to achieve scalable image results.
The Canon 70d comes with the auto white balance (AWB) setting for automatic adjustment of the lighting of the image. The sunlight keeps on changing throughout the day, so you need to adjust the white balance of the image to maintain consistency in your photographs. It’s better to switch from standard white balance to AWB setting to capture accurate colors in uniform wildlife photographs.
