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I'd been lurking around /p/ for a bit and reading about photography, so I bought a Nikon D3500 the other day. I went out this weekend, and I caught a cardinal waving hello! I manually adjusted the fstop and shutter, so could somebody give me a rule of thumb of how to go about these pictures in the future? The concept in my head was low fstop for DoF, high shutter for precision but the precise numbers seem arbitrary to me as a beginner.
Also, what strategies are useful when editing this kind of picture? I think the colors look muted, and that may be because I had some exposure compensation set from earlier. Is this something I can adjust for as I take the picture is it best left to post-processing?
What kind of approach should I take when framing this kind of picture? My thought process when taking it was to have the lines of the building flow with the shape of the bird. My expectation is that the eye sees the architecture, then naturally leans towards the subject. I tried to capture it in a way that didnt have too much of the open background so the wing still had an approachable flow. Not sure how to word it.
