In My Own Backyard
A major part of my learning process as a photographer has been looking at other people's work. Hundreds of hours of browsing Instagram and watching YouTube videos of professionals explaining their process or walking through techniques has given me tons of great insight. Some of my favorite photos I've happened across were taken by wildlife photographers such as Simon Dentremont. Their ability to exercise extreme patience and capture incredible moments resonates heavily with me. The same methods for photographing birds and other wildlife seems like they'd be very useful for taking photos of people at esports LANs and other events.
After absorbing wildlife photography content and appreciating professional grade photos, I remembered I had a bird feeder in my own back yard. Just like with events, the best way to learn is by doing so I've been spending the last few days outdoors practicing. Unfortunately I don't have the best equipment for shooting wildlife. The highest zoom lens I currently own is a 70-200mm SIGMA f2.8. Obviously it gets the job done but capturing images on my Sony A7ii 24mp camera at a max zoom of 200mm means I'm forced to crop in a lot which the image quality suffers from. Don't get me wrong, I'm still really happy with the results, but when comparing them to the professional shots I've been learning from, they leave a lot to be desired. The only usable photos I've gotten were of squirrels because they don't mind my presence as much and allow me to get much closer than birds.
Aside from learning how to be patient and how to properly set my ISO, aperature, and shutter speed to capture small quick movements, wildlife photogrpahy is getting me to pay attention to color grading. I've noticed that most professional wildlife photos are attempting to stay as true to reality as possible with very minor stylization. That means working a lot with greens and browns which seems to be a bit tricky. For now I'm limited to using presets and tweaking specific details from there, but now I know there's a lot I need to learn about adjusting colors so I have another thing to add to my list of objectives.
Overall this type of photography seems like it has potential to be a ton of fun, but I think I might need to either upgrade my camera body to something with more megapixels, or get a higher zoom lens. I would love to be able to capture birds but for now it's time to do some more research and watch some color grading tutorials.
