Essentials of wild bird photography

A long lens and a fast shutter speed top the list

When you want the bird to fill the frame to see its features in detail, and when you want the sharpest possible image with no blur evident, two things are essential - a long lens to bring you closer to your subject and a fast shutter speed.

LENSES

Shooting individual birds, even chickadees in the back yard, with a camera's standard 50 mm lens will simply not provide you with satisfying images. Some bird species, such as those in large sea-bird colonies at nesting time, can be approached close enough to use a normal lens like this, but these opportunities are rare. Approaching nesting birds too closely can upset them and even result in injury, something no photographer should want to cause.

Focal length

If you are shooting at a bird feeding platform or in an aviary at the zoo, where the birds are relatively tame and accustomed to people in close proximity, and don't mind being close to you themselves, a 135 mm lens might be adequate. A good zoom lens, adjusted to its longest telephoto setting, may also do the trick. But most wild bird photography benefits from using the longest, fastest, sharpest lens you can afford. This doesn’t mean you should run out and blow the rent on a 600 mm monster lens. A 200 mm or 300 mm lens is often adequate, especially when shooting from a blind which conceals you from their view, permitting them to come closer.

When shooting some normally-elusive or very cautious birds without the benefit of a blind for your concealment, a 300 mm lens could even be too short for the ideal bird shot. It just may not bring you close enough to your wary subjects. A 500 mm or 600 mm lens may be called for. But most of us don't have such a super-telephoto lens. However, all is not lost. Attaching a less-expensive teleconverter to a 200 mm or 300 mm lens can give very good results.

If you don't have a very long lens and you don't have a teleconverter, either, you shouldn't feel that you are completely ill-equipped to take good bird pictures. Shooting at a very high resolution with your digital camera, or shooting with a fine-grain film in a traditional camera, may permit you to crop your pictures later, resulting in good quality, sharp bird photos that fill the frame. Many of today's digital cameras have superb lenses that are so sharp, they permit severe cropping while still retaining good detail in a smaller portion of the original picture.

Lens speed

A fast lens (one that has a wide maximum aperture) permits you to use faster shutter speeds and to work in dimmer light. Very long focal length lenses (500 mm and longer) that are also fast are quite expensive. You may find that you have to compromise, and either select a fast lens that has a shorter focal length (a 200 mm ƒ2.8 or a 400 mm ƒ3.5, as examples), or a very long 500 mm or 600 mm lens that is not especially fast, but that doesn't put you in the poor house in order to buy it. These lenses will still make excellent pictures, just with less versatility.

SHUTTER SPEED

Shutter speeds for bird picture-taking will depend on the bird's flying or ground speed, the speed of their wings beating, how far away they are, their approach angles, your lens's length, available light and your camera's digital ISO sensitivity setting (or film speed). A fast shutter speed will enable you to freeze motion, often very desirable in shooting these fast-moving feathered creatures. At least 1/500 sec is required to stop the action of most birds passing diagonally by in flight. Soaring birds like eagles, hawks and buzzards can be captured at 1/250 second or slower if you pan with their movement. Particularly-speedy ones, like the hummingbird or heavy wild fowl with rapidly-beating wings, will need even faster shutter speeds of 1/1000 sec and more or electronic flash to eliminate blur.

There are exceptions to the need for stop-action photography of individual birds. Slow shutter speeds convey a sense of motion, which you sometimes want in your bird picture. A slight blurring of wings can waken up a picture. Some wading birds, such as herons, can stand stock still forever, it seems, and don’t need a fast shutter. A two-second exposure might not show any motion at all. Just be sure that your camera is solidly-supported so that it doesn't show the wrong kind of motion — camera shake. A good tripod will do the job.

Two big problems in shooting birds when flying or stationary are focus and exposure.

FOCUS

If you have a fast-reacting auto-focus lens, you have a big advantage in photographing birds in the sky or flitting quickly through foliage. If not, the most difficult focusing situation seems to occur when birds are flying towards you. Try manually focusing ahead of the bird and take your shot the moment it flies into sharp focus; or focus on the bird as soon as you spot it and begin turning the focusing ring in order to keep your subject sharp in the viewfinder. Manual focusing of this nature sounds easy in principle, but can be difficult and needs practice to be comfortable with it.

Setting your aperture for hyperfocal distance can relieve your focusing concerns in many bird-shooting situations.

One of the biggest focusing problems of bird photography occurs when attempting to shoot a bird in a tree or a bush. Your camera's auto-focus tends to lock your camera in on whatever is in focus, naturally, but what is in focus may be a branch, leaf or twig - not the bird itself.

A good way around this problem is to cancel out your camera's auto-focusing capability and switch to manual focusing.

Then, you can set your lens to focus only on the bird as you see it through the lens, like the little hummingbird shown on the right. The camera's auto-focus would have been befuddled by the number of branches and leaves, but the picture of the bird was easily captured by switching to manual focus.

Using manual focus can also be helpful with birds on the wing. Auto-focus is great when it is actually locked in on the bird, but when it isn't and you are searching the sky with your camera for a bird that you know is there, your auto-focus can go crazy trying to find something solid to lock onto. By the time it finds the bird, the opportunity for a good shot may be gone. If you switch to manual focus when you're scanning the skies for your feathery subject, and set your focus for the approximate distance, you will often find it is quick and easy to manually turn the focusing ring just the right amount for a sharp picture of a fleeting bird without the auto-focus woes.

EXPOSURE

Exposure is not usually a problem for most camera’s metering systems if the bird is flying against an everyday blue sky or a landscape backdrop, or if the sky is overcast and there are no harsh shadows. However, you may need to increase the exposure by up to two stops if the sky is bright or brilliant white clouds are behind the bird. Your camera's center-weighted meter may tend to underexpose the bird. Against a dark, stormy or deep blue sky, you may need to decrease the exposure.

You would be wise to select spot metering, if your camera has that capability, in much of your bird photography, especially when the bird is relatively small in the frame (i.e more sky than bird), and take a meter reading from only the bird.

A MIXTURE OF HELPFUL HINTS, TIPS & POINTERS

• Birds almost always rise into the wind. They may turn as soon as they are airborne, but as often as not they will continue to fly into the wind to gain lift or carry on to their destination. If you are positioned upwind of a bird on the ground or surface of the water, be prepared for it to fly overhead for a closer picture.
• In the majority of instances, soft frontal lighting is ideal for bird pictures.
• If you are shooting with a digital camera and have plenty of storage capacity (or lots of film for your traditional camera), don't hesitate to take numerous pictures in rapid succession of the same bird or flock. Wing movement, shadows, sudden turns, flying behind a tree or foliage, and changing backgrounds are some of the many factors that can either ruin a shot or surprise you with an unexpected image that you will be pleased to have. The more pictures you take, the greater the likelihood of really good results.
• The time of day can be a big influence on your pictures of birds on the wing. Taking pictures in the morning and afternoon of a bright day, when the sun is fairly low, will illuminate the birds' sides and underparts as they are flying or perched above you.
• Photographing birds flying fairly low over water or a white, sandy beach on a bright day may benefit from light reflected on their undersides from the water or sand.
• It is perhaps surprising, but very little concealment is usually needed when photographing birds at fairly close range. It is movement, especially sudden movement, that causes them alarm. Remaining still in the shade of a tree, bush or rock, and using slow camera-handling movements will likely not disturb a bird. When you are seated quietly with your camera ready, birds may simply not notice you, and approach more closely or even take off to fly directly overhead. Nonetheless, there is still a big benefit from properly using a blind (or hide) for bird photography, in which you are guaranteed not to be noticed by your feathered subjects.
• Be ready to photograph a bird flying towards you or above you. When it finally notices you and swerves away, it will give you a good opportunity to shoot while its undersides are exposed to the sun.
• Encourage ducks on the water to come closer by putting out decoys and by placing grain on the ground in front of your place of concealment. Decoys should be located to the side of your main field of view, which should have plenty of open water space for ducks to drop down onto.
• In dry climates, one of the most-effective attractants to bring birds in close for photography is water. Rather than putting out a tray of water, you will get natural-looking pictures if you fill a dried water hole or depression in the ground. A proven method is to set up a container in a nearby bush with a small hole in it that will allow water to drip into a pool. Feeding a hose or rubber tubing into the container with a tap located in your place of concealment to control the flow of dripping water is almost guaranteed to attract a variety of thirsty birds.
• In swamplands and marshy areas, a boat or rubber raft is an indispensable platform from which to take bird pictures and move your camera equipment from place to place.
• Forests and heavily-wooded areas have their own set of problems, the main one being excessive contrast due to the patchy light that makes its way through the foliage. Reflectors and fill flash are good solutions, and spot metering will obtain good exposure for individual close-up shots.