Active Birding

To find more birds you need to do more than sit around and hope for a good report of birds in your area. Get out and find the birds yourself. Active birding will increase your chances of getting more birds and you can have lots of fun in the process. After all one of the most fun things in birding is getting to go to cool places to find them. If you use more active birding tactics you can get more birds and see more cool places. You can car pool with birding friends to help with transportation! It is a great way to save on gas. I guarantee that if you do this rather than sitting at the computer hoping for a report, go and make the report yourself. Someone has to make the reports, and it might as well be you. Thanks for reading our blog!
Posted by John Mark Simmons

Eastern Wood Pewee

Photo Tip: White Balance

Here is another tip using our cooperative Red Shouldered Hawks again. This time hunting in my garden. It was a very cloudy and rainy day so the lighting wasn't that good. I first took a few photos with my white balance on AUTO. Then I took the rest of the pictures with my white balance on CLOUDY. I want to know your opinion on this. Does it look better with or without the white balance on cloudy. If you set your white balance correctly it usually makes the lighting look nomal. But sometimes it doesn't and ends up making it worse. My shutter speed was low and I didn't want to raise my ISO to much to fix it or else it might be too noisy. So I shot with ISO 400. There might be some barely noticeable blur and that is because of the shutter speed. But my main point is about the white balance. So leave a comment down below and say what you think looks better. Thanks for reading everybody! Please help spread the word about Two Birders and Binoculars.
John Mark Simmons for TB

With white balance on CLOUDY

 With white balance on AUTO.

Depth of Field (DOF)

Here is a quick tip about depth of field. This photo that I took in Colorado was at the F stop 5.6 Most people just say F5.6. You will probably notice how blurred everything else is except the head. This is because of the depth of field F5.6 creates. Especially at 300mm. The LOWER the f stop number is, the higher your shutter speed is and the shallower your depth of field is. The HIGHER your F stop number the lower your shutter speed is and more things will be in focus. When it is a higher number like F8 the depth of field will not be so shallow. More things will be in focus. Many landscape photographers use high F stops like F22 or higher because it gets the whole landscape in focus. But for wildlife photography, it is usually best to shoot with as low of an f stop as possible. Because it increases the quality of the photo and makes the subject stand out more. If this lizard photo had been taken at F 8 or higher, I probably wouldn't like it so much. Because usually when more is in focus, the more boring the photo is. This is a principle of bird photography, I  do not speak for other forms of photography. Although this a is a pretty general rule.
Posted by John Mark Simmons