GoodBye - See you in Autumn

[behind_a_shutter]

Difficulty 1:
I have always tried capturing birds from below. But hardly manage the super zoom with the PnS cameras. In this case The shutter speed was low and somehow (with lot of luck) the bird was pretty low while I was on a ship(launch).

Difficulty 2:
I would need help in the quick decision making while capturing wildlife.
Also, I felt animals, birds and insects dont give me enough time to capture their best pose (:P). So what is advisable in case, when I have a PnS which has a difficult manual focus to control (in Canon SX20IS its like a iPod like wheel on the back of the camera which resets everytime, I cant even do prefocus)

Difficulty 3:
Should auto-focus work best in wildlife imaging or I should work harder on manual focus?

Location: Chiemsee, Germany
Camera: Kodak C140
Shutter Speed: 1/125sec
Aperture: f/5.7
ISO: 80
Metering Mode: ??
Exposure Comp: 0
Marco: No

[Dodge]

Hi b_a_s,

I can only speak from personal preference, but I mainly shoot any wildlife from birds and larger in auto focus, always focusing on the creatures eye whenever possible. Quite often the shot may require a fast opportunistic snap and the subject can be gone or moved elsewhere by the time you have focussed manually and taken other stuff into account. The times I switch to manual are for macro or if the subject is within a lot of other stuff, like foliage or branches and the lens is inclined to hunt for a focal point.

As I'm still very inexperienced, I also find that autofocussing gives me one less thing to think about, leaving more space in my tiny mind to consider lighting, depth of field, composition etc....

[behind_a_shutter]

Thanks for your sugesstions.

The most important takeaway lesson from me is now to "keep focus (and try to maintain) focus for the eyes" of the subject. However what I did not clearly understand is...

Where to position the auto-focus area of the frame so the the contrast is easier for the internal algorithm (of the camera) for passive focus calculation???