Tips for photographing small mammals

       Photographing small mammals outdoors is not unlike working with small garden birds such as wrens and blue tits. They are usually very fidgety and rarely keep st ill for any length of time, so it is necessary to use rapid, pinpoint accurate, single-point auto focus and short shutter speeds of around 1/500 sec or less. The added difficulty with small mammals is that they will invariably react to the sound of a shutter going off , and they are extremely slow (if at all) to becoming conditioned to it. Shoot a sequence of two or more frames at a longish shutter speed, of say 1/125 sec, and it is likely that only the first is going to be reasonably sharp compared to the following ones, in which the animal will have react ed to the shutter sound with a jerking motion, blurring the image.

      There are a number of ways of dealing with this, such as shooting selectively and using single frame advance when shooting portraits. Some cameras obviously have quieter shutters than others, although it is oft en possible to improvise a makeshift ‘blimp’ by wrapping the likes of a fleece or woolen scarf around the camera body. Mirror-less camera systems have an obvious advantage in this resp etc.

     Maintaining a reasonable working distance from the subject can help, too. This obviously depends on the focal length of your lens, because there is a fine balance between being close enough so that it appears big enough in the frame, but not too close that you risk disturbing the animal. Fortunately, most modern long lenses focus fairly close, and a focal length of 300 mm to 500 mm works best when photographing from a distance of three to five meters from the subject . Cropped sensor cameras are a bonus here, too.

      If you have problems getting a long lens to focus close enough, then try using a 1.4x teleconverter to obtain more magnification at the lens’s minimum focusing distance. Alternatively, you can use thin extension tubes. Canon users have a distinct advantage here, because Canon offers up-to-date extension tubes with electrical connect ions that allow data transfer between camera and lens; this means auto-focus and exposure metering are maintained. Nikon users have to resort to the third-party extension tubes from Kenko to achieve this, but because the internal diameter of these is less than the old manual focus Nikon PK series tubes, they can cause serious vignetting with many lenses on full-frame cameras.