Shutter Problems!!!!!

During my first session at Old Moore nature reserve (theme 1) I realised that using a fast shutter was not as easy as I thought it would be.  This being down to the weather not being as bright as I had been told by the good old faithfull weatherman and the restriction on the natural light in the bird garden.

The bird hide in which I was shooting from was in the garden, this is at the back of the visitor centre which from indoors you can look out into the garden and see the hide.  Round the back of the hide is woodland where a large number of garden birds seem to spend the day, coming into the garden and feeding on the feeders.  As nice as this all is it certainly restricts the amount of light coming into the garden and as a result I found it quite a challenge to freeze the birds and get sharp, clear images. The images below are off the garden and hopefully from these you can see why the light is restricted.

View from inside the visitor centre looking out into the Bird Garden

View from  Garden Hide

View from Garden Hide (opposite side)

I had to use an ISO of 400 with the shutter set at 1/100 sec, I have added a few images below which show the result of this.  I am not to happy with the results as they are not as sharp as I would have liked and if you start to zom in on the images you can see that the movemeent has not been frozen with some blur appearing.  There is also a lot of noise in the images to from using a higher ISO.

You can see from the above images (once opened up) that they are not great, I did set the Shutter to a much faster setting, for example 1/400, 1/500 but these were simply to short with the images being very dark. 

My next visit to Old Moore will be later this week and the challenge here is to solve this problem and hopefully return home with much better images.  One thing I can do that doesnt involve the camera settings is to plan my day better at the reserve.  Instead of shooting from the bird garden early morning I will wait until the after noon when the natural light is better.  Hopefully taking advantage of this light I will be able to reduce the ISO back to approx 200 and increase the shutter to approx 1/500 in order to freeze the birds and get much sharper images.

There are 4-5 hides set out on the reserve that are out in the open and overlooking large areas of open water and the light really did make a difference.  It also left a brilliant glow on the reserve as the sun was setting which was amazing. 

I didnt get chance to go round all the hides so hopefully on my next visit I'll be more prepared, getting there earlier and being able to get round the whole reserve. 

The images below are some of the better ones which I wil consider using, as you can see the light is much better and the images are sharper.