Include the bird's surroundings

Provide interest and context to your images

Although a close-up, full-frame image of a bird will often be a fine shot, you should also include their surroundings in your pictures to show their habitat and to provide you with design elements to enhance your photographs.

If you have a woodpecker in view, hard at work, tapping away like a demented carpenter, include some of the holes the bird has drilled in your image. Other examples of surrounding elements may be a fragile perch, a bird house, a nest or a rock, or even other birds with which your subject is interacting.

Look for visual patterns, like the even spacing of nests in a bird colony or the symmetry of a flock in flight. If your shot is of a bird normally found by the ocean, then be sure that at least one of your pictures contains a reminder of the bird’s environment - waves, beach, whatever fits cohesively into the make-up of your picture. The photograph of a great blue heron shown here could have been shot from a lower angle so that the background contained only sky, but since the great blue is found by the ocean, a watery backdrop seemed more fitting, particularly since the bird's reflection is scattered over the surface.

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS FILL THE FRAME IN BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY

One of the so-called compositional rules of photography, and an important one, is to fill the frame - that is, to move in on your subject either physically or with a longer lens until your center of interest is as large as possible in the viewfinder while excluding everything else that is not needed to make the picture. When photographing birds, the “fill the frame” rule still applies, as do all of the guidelines with respect to good composition, but its practicality is dubious because of the nature of the subject itself.

You may want a bird to fill the entire frame, but the bird (having sparse understanding of pleasing photographic composition) may not see things your way, and there will be many times when just getting the bird in the view frame to take its picture is all you can do before the feathered creature disappears from sight. Birds usually don’t stay in one place too long, and generally won’t allow you to approach close enough to fill the frame with their plumaged bodies. More often than not, your best bird images will be of birds in flight or perched relatively far away, surrounded by large areas of sky or other background space, requiring you to crop the negative or slide in order to fill the frame with their image alone.

USING SPACE IN YOUR COMPOSITION

This means you must learn how to use surrounding space to make the most of your bird pictures. In other words, when you can’t get close enough to fill the frame with your image’s center of interest (the bird), you must know how to make an interesting composition incorporating the other elements that must unavoidably be in the picture.

What are these other elements? They are the things that surround the bird when you can’t get close enough to eliminate them. How you handle them is what’s important.

In a poor composition, these elements can be the unsightly rooftop of a house or a hydro-electric tower in the background. In a good composition, one that is carefully planned, a surrounding element can be a bird’s natural perch (a tree branch against a background of neutral foliage, a bullrush with a watery backdrop, or a rock with a background that is so out-of-focus and unrecognizable that it may not matter what it is) or other surroundings that give a sense of the bird’s natural habitat, whether they include a backdrop of pine trees, palm trees, hedgerows, swampland or tall grass.

THE BIRD MAY NOT BE THE ONLY IMPORTANT ELEMENT

When including surroundings in a bird image, skill in landscape photography comes into play. Not only must you show your bird subject at its best, but you must figure out how to make its surroundings look equally interesting so they contribute to your photograph and - very important - complement the bird itself.

Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? It's not as complicated as it may seem. Sometimes, the best background is open sky - nothing but trees or an expanse of water. Simpler is generally better anyway, so as not to detract from the bird as the center of interest. As you gain more experience in using the bird’s surroundings to enhance your bird images, you will soon be creating photographs that have merit as both a bird picture and a landscape.

THE BIRD'S THE WORD

The key to your images’ success will be to ensure that the bird clearly remains the center of interest, not just a part of the overall scene, even when the bird is only a small part of the composition. If the landscape aspect of the image shows the bird’s habitat in a pleasing way and the bird looks great, your picture will likely be a keeper. But, if the landscape overpowers the presence of the bird, it will be a landscape picture, not a bird picture, and will not be what you set out to produce.

Your skill at composition really comes into play. The image at left, for example, follows the Rule of Thirds in terms of placement of the center of interest (the bird, or rather, the bird's eye).

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

A zoo, aviary, bird sanctuary or wildlife preserve can provide you with a good supply of bird subjects and challenging surroundings, which make them good places to practice and perfect your bird photography skills.

Often, such places have wire or glassed-in enclosures, or the background areas contain other exhibits, buildings and a variety of distracting elements. A medium telephoto lens and shallow depth of field will be of benefit. Look over your results with a critical eye after your film has been processed. Think of what you could to improve the images, then go back and make better ones. The experience and self-training will prepare you to photograph birds in their natural habitat.