Best settings for Canon SX740 to photo birds

You might ask @ececc, apparently they use the same camera.

The DPreview forum board has a discussion about this camera and bird photography.

Just Birding recommends this camera and has some good general bird photography settings advice.

I don’t know this specific camera, but I do a lot of wildlife photography and birds are not an uncommon subject.

Your key issues are light, shutter speed, and depth of field. Unfortunately, with point-and-shoot cameras your ability to manually control those is limited.

For birds you generally need a decently fast shutter speed (unless the bird is sitting still) to avoid a blurry shot, so that’s your first limiting factor, and is a good starting point to work from.

Depth of field (f-stop) is essentially how much of your image will be in focus. The more that’s in focus (larger f-stop number) the less light you have, and vice-versa.

ISO is approximately how sensitive your sensor is to light, a higher ISO means it’s more sensitive to light, but that also results in a more grainy or ‘noisy’ image. A lower ISO results in a more clean image, but the sensor is less sensitive to light, os you have to either lower your shutter speed (more time, more light, more movement of the subject, potentially more blurry of an image) or you have to reduce the f-stop (smaller number, more light comes in, shallower depth of focus, more difficult to get a properly focused image).

Unfortunately, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ setting, and a large part of photography is learning what settings work in different conditions and how to semi-intuitively adjust them on the fly.

While cameras like yours may not have fully adjustable settings, they do have settings that highlight certain priorities (eg. ‘keep the shutter speed at X and let everything else be automatic’, or ‘limit ISO to a maximum of X’). These are the sorts of settings you’ll have to play around with.

Another factor that’s immensely important for final image quality is post-processing. No professional photographer ever uses an image straight out of the camera, it’s always processed as a camera doesn’t see the world the same way as an eye does, and a photo has to be adjusted to represent what you saw (or what you want to show). This is usually done via processing the RAW images (the images before your camera has done its own internal processing), but your camera doesn’t have an option to take RAW photos. That’s ok though, even post-processing the non-RAW images your camera produces will make an enormous difference.

In photography this post-processing portion is where the majority of the time and effort goes.

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