Trip to north padre and port aransas

[Kayaker72]

If you are trying to freeze motion with birds, I am still not great at this, but use as fast as shutter speed as possible. Use all the speed. It is amazing how you will reveal layers of sharpness beyond "usably sharp" with faster shutter speeds. One thought is to start at very fast shutter speeds and if you are uncomfortable with the ISO, after you have a series of shots at the fast shutter speed, slowly slow your shutter and decrease your ISO to see if you can get the shot, but a less noisy version.

But, to talk about minimums, for BIF, it does depend a bit on the size of bird, what you are trying to accomplish, and how quick the motion is that you are trying to capture. Small birds tend to be faster. Dives = fast.

I shoot in manual mode, but other modes could be used.

Even larger birds require some fast shutter speeds. My target is usually something like 1/1600th of a second, but there gets to be a lot of variation based on available light. I start noticing blur usually at 1/800th of a second, sometimes 1/1,000th of a second, but I'll still get some usable shots at those shutter speeds, so it depends on available light, how fast the action is and if I was being dumb at that moment.

Smaller birds movement, I target 1/2000th (maybe a bit slower) of a second or faster.

Very fast action, landings take offs: ~1/3200th of a second or faster.

Of course, if you want wing blur, 1/100th to 1/400th of a second is a pretty good range. Most of my hummingbird shots are around 1/200th of a second.

Aperture tends to be wide open for the lens. The time to go to higher aperture numbers is if you need DoF for a flock of birds or if a bird is very close to you.

ISO and metering tends to be a bit of a discussion point. I tend to do one of two things, if lighting is variable I tend to switch to Auto-ISO and spot metering and try to get the bird in center of frame when shooting. If lighting is more consistent, I tend to freeze ISO at a setting I like and then metering doesn't matter as I am in full manual mode (nothing is auto).

But, with all this, I absolutely drop lower than these recommended minimums. Usually I regret it at least a little as I see motion blur.

Enjoy your trip!