For Allison

I was originally going to call this post ‘Meet Daphne.’ Daphne is an English Robin who sometimes accompanies me when I’m gardening. Last Saturday was one of those days. I was lifting the last of my dahlias before the frost had them, when Daphne joined me. However, instead of just presenting my photos as interesting and cute as they are I recalled there are a number of our readers who are budding photographers, so I thought it might also be useful to provide some tips on how to capture your garden friends.


I first became aware of Daphne when I was stacking my dahlia tubers. Here she is peeping out at me from the rack where I store my tubers. The light was not good so it really helps if your lens has VR (vibration reduction), although your camera may well have another name for essentially the same thing. I had my camera set at ISO 200 to get the best image quality. This photo was taken at 1/100 which is fine if you have VR and your subject doesn’t move. Do try to get your active focus point over the subject's eye as this needs to be sharp.



After a while Daphne hopped out of my tuber rack and into the open. This time presenting a new set of problems. The light was bright sunlight, low in the sky with very hard shadows with the robin appearing dark against a light background. Just the sort of conditions to fox your camera’s exposure meter, so as I did, you might well need some exposure compensation. Remember the range of dark and light values that a camera can record is nowhere what the human eye can see.


By sitting very still if you are lucky your inquisitive subject will come closer allowing you to get a lovely detailed photograph. Click on it to see the detail in the feathers. Of course the closer your subject comes then the less will be your depth of field. (The parts of the photograph in focus.) So do make sure you focus on the eye and try for a smaller aperture if you can. This was taken at f 6.3.


Of course if you reduce your aperture your shutter speed drops, which gives you problems with camera shake. Robins move incredibly fast and it’s unlikely that you will ever be able to be ably to deploy a shutter speed fast enough to stop them once they move. Here the only thing left in sharp focus is the little bit of dry grass flicked up when Daphne departed.


Here you can see my shutter speed wasn’t fast enough to capture beak movement when Daphne decided to shout.


Here Daphne was in strong shadow so I quickly flipped up my camera’s built in flash, reduced the flash compensation by approximately one stop and used the flash to fill in the shadows.


Finally here is Daphne where she likes to sit best of all on the lip of my wheel barrow. I hope this has given you some ideas for a morning with your camera.