“You never know what you are gonna get”, is the right attitude when you go out for a game-drive. Therefore it is best to set your camera to settings that will allow you to take some shorts of whatever suddenly pops up. It happens all too often that opportunities are missed because of wrong settings or even the camera being switched off (remember you can always recharge a battery but that leopard walking briskly across the road will not do that again.).
So before I go out I will set my camera (a Nikon d7000) to the following setting knowing that these will generally will give me a good chance to get decent pictures;
- I shoot in Aperture Priority mode, this allows me to influence the depth of field but my camera will calculate the shutter speed
- My aperture will be at 8 allowing for more depth of field but still a quick shutter speed
- I will set my ISO to 400, lower ISO can be used for the bright conditions at the beginning of afternoon safari, in the morning my ISO will be 800 at the least
- I shoot high quality pictures in RAW format. RAW might be more difficult to process but it gives way more options to enhance your pictures in your processing phase at home
Once you have your initial shots in the bag you can adapt your settings to maximize the quality of the shots your are getting. The closer you are to the perfect shot on your camera the better it is.
Roel