OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND CAMERA SHAKE

Monday, June 13, 2005

Last weekend, I was out with the camera in the periphery of the town and I got a chance to try my hands on car-birding. Car birding is when you go photographing the birds while sitting in your car. It is quite popular since birds are less averse to people in cars than walkers.

And we did find many birds close to the car. Most of the times, we stopped briefly, took a few photographs and continued. While we got down from the car if we were spending long time in a place, we would just keep the engine on, shoot for a brief period and continue quickly. We spotted and photographed a good number of birds. While reviewing on the camera lcd over a cup of coffee at the end of the session, I could see quite a few impressive pictures that would be hard to come by without the car.

But the computer had a different story to tell. When I went home and downloaded the picture, most of the pictures seemed to be in a sad state. Most of the pictures shot from the car were fuzzy and not sharp. And it becomes all the more apparent when you view full size digital images. I could not blame the low shutter speed, since there was enough light and I was shooting at higher ISO. I was pretty surprised to see that even a picture taken at a shutter speed of 1/1250 second had considerable amount of camera shake!

After much contemplation, I am considering keeping the engine on as one factor that should have contributed to this. There were no perceivable vibrations and hence I had not bothered to turn off the engine. I find it unlikely that shake from the hand should matter at such high shutter speeds so this is the only explanation I could think of. I intend to confim this in future car-birding trips.

I am now contemplating on moving to tripod sooner than I thought. I usually shoot handheld and I used to feel comfortable at it when I was shooting film. Aside, that’s another reason to think about going for an IS lens as soon as I can afford one. Below is one of the pictures I had taken. This was shot at 1/320 seconds and I normally used get decent output at such shutter speeds.

I loved the composition of red whiskered bulbul below. Taken at a shutter speed of 1/320 seconds from the car with the engine on, alas has come out soft and fuzzy.