Amateur Bird Photography

Learning about birds, photography and bird photography all at the same time is challenging. I have been learning for 20 years and am still going. But that is the exciting part. When I feel I have nothing left to learn about photography and birds, is when I will retire. This article is about my journey.

Overview

Birds are my love and my nemesis. First of all, I have to find them. That involves travelling, early starts and frequently lying in mud. Secondly, birds don't stay still. I sometimes wish I just wanted to photograph plants. I might have to travel to find them, but when I get there the plants would be still and pose quietly. Birds have at least 180 degrees of room to move in and they generally don't like me. Lastly, photography is all about the light. The difference between an ok shot and a cracker shot is very often the location of the sun. And very often it is in the wrong place for the photograph I want to take.

But then, all is forgiven when I get a shot like the one below.

Frigatebirds in the Galapagos Islands

My story starts when I spent some time travelling in 2006 through Europe, the United States and South America. That journey ended with Spectacled Owl in the Amazon, Rufous-collared Sparrow in Ecuador and Magnificent Frigatebirds on the Galapagos Islands. A burgeoning interest in nature had been sparked by my travels but my photography was strictly point and shoot. However, I took this photograph on an island in the Galapagos and I have loved it ever since. It is backlit and taken with automatic settings so technically it is not great but every time I look at it, I see something new. There are frigatebirds, fish, seals and pelican. The image has no filters or other processing and I like that as well. A throw back to film photography perhaps.

Learning to love birds in New Zealand

Shortly after travelling I emigrated to New Zealand (after falling in love with it whilst travelling). New Zealand is a stunning country and while it is roughly the same size as the U.K., there are 5 million people compared to 70 million back home. That means lots and lots of countryside with no people. Unfortunately, there are no native mammals (except for a solitary bat species) and the bird population has been decimated since European colonization. However, the birds that are native and endemic to New Zealand are just incredible. I began to learn about them and take more photographs to record my sightings.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Kākāpō

One of the first photographs I took of New Zealand birds was of the Kākāpō, a flightless and nocturnal parrot. You cannot see these parrots in the wild unless you sign up for volunteer programs that are vastly oversubscribed and difficult to get into. Enter Sirocco, a flagparrot (if you will), with his own seat on the national airline and entertainer of visiting celebrities. He toured the country for a while, raising the profile of this critically endangered species. There are still less than 250 of these birds left and they are carefully managed.

And so it was that in 2011, I visited a local bird sanctuary to see Sirocco. I was all set with elbows and camera ready. He was in an enclosure built of plywood and behind plexi-glass under orange lighting. With my little point and shoot camera I snapped some very poor photographs. My first (and probably last) encounter with this parrot that resembled a big, green chicken made me fall in love with birds

Canon DSLR

I began to think I really should invest in some better camera gear and bought my first DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex). I quickly decided on Canon and simply bought the most expensive model I could afford. Over the next few years, I worked my way up from a 700D to a 70D but I still didn't really understand how they worked. A semi-professional photographer (my cousin) helped explain that the ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed were like a triangle, all related to light. For bird photography, I learned the most important thing is the Shutter Speed, ie, how long the shutter is open. For moving targets, a sharp image needs a fast shutter speed to capture the subject.

I had started taking photos using completely automatic settings, allow the camera to measure the light. Unfortunately, when cameras do this they measure an average of the light available. When you are shooting a dark bird against a bright sky, for instance, automatic settings register the high light levels and so adjusts the exposure accordingly and you end up with an underexposed, dark bird. That's what happened with my Galapagos photo.

My cousin told me the golden rule for avian photography - always expose for the bird. I started to play around with my settings, using a high shutter speed to ensure sharp focus and manipulating the ISO and aperture size for the exposure. I settled on 1/800 a second shutter speed as being my base for bird photography.

Fast Shutter Speeds

New Zealand might have a severe lack of birds inland but gosh the access to seabirds is phenomenal. The deep trenches where seabirds feed are easily reached and pelagic trips run regularly from several ports on the North and South Islands. Over the years it has been a great place to practise taking bird photographs in difficult conditions. Not only are the birds soaring at some speed but there is also the rolling of the boat itself. The pelagic boats are usually fishing charters that groups of birders hire. The trips were always amazing and the long-suffering crew, although slightly bemused by us, would chase the birds around the ocean for hours.

We might see up to 6 species of albatross on a pelagic. This is a shot of a Salvin's Mollymawk, a small specis of albatross. It is coming into land. The ISO is at 200 as it was a clear day and the aperture was at its widest setting of 5.0. The shutter speed is 1/6400th of a second, which helped to get a reasonably sharp focus (I was on a boat remember). This was my first attempt at photographing fast moving birds.

Canon 5D and 6D

I upgraded to a Canon 6D with a 100-400mm lens. This seemed to be the common set up for most bird photographers I met and it served me well for several years.

I now practised using totally manual settings and was lucky in that the 6D had an inbuilt flash. Technically, I was still not very good but it wasn't for the lack of trying. I had begun to travel to Australia to see and photograph birds and was steadily building up my catalogue of bird photographs. I was particularly proud of this photograph of an owl. It was deep in dark rainforest in Queensland, Australia and set back in a hole, high up in a tree. I only took 3 shots as I didn't want to disturb it with the flash. The settings were ISO 2000, f5.0 and shutter speed 1/250th of a second (the fastest allowed with a flash).

Unfortunately, as we birders do, I took another photographer down to see the owl but it was in pouring rain. I had my camera packed away in my rucksack and thought nothing of it. Until I returned to my room to find my camera sitting in a puddle in the bag. One trip to the nearest city later and I had upgraded to the Canon 5D. It had better specifications without all the bells and whistles of the 6D.

Canon 500mm Lens

I treated myself to a prime lens in 2015 and bought the Canon 500mm lens. It was magnificent and absolutely huge. I would get stopped all the time by people asking me about it. At first I couldn't hold it up high for more than 3 shots but I quickly got used to the weight. With an aperture of 4.0, I thought it was the best thing ever made. I was still focused on maximising the light.

Photographing Shorebirds

In 2016 I moved to a little township on the North Island of New Zealand, set on a Ramsar estuary. I had been visiting it for years as shorebirds are also something New Zealand does well. Living there meant instant access to them. I learned all about the Wrybill, an endemic shorebird with the only laterally curved bill in the world. It was one of many incredible birds I found there. I spent lots of hours lying on the beach and wriggling along like a commando to get closer to them. The settings for this photo are ISO 100, f4.0 and 1/1250th of a second shutter speed.

The sharpness of the face is great in this image but with the 4.0 aperture, the depth of field is really shallow. Hence the face is in focus but everything behind it is not. But I was happy with a clear shot of such a rare and unique bird.

Using an extender

With the 5D came a change to my photography. It is a full frame sensor so the photograph reflects everything in the view finder. The old 6D cropped the image, effectively zooming in a little. Consequently I bought a 1.4 extender to make up for the loss. The downside of extenders is that they are heavy and you lose f stops. Now the widest aperture I had was f8.0 as opposed to f4.0 without. This image of a Bar-tailed Godwit was taken as I lay on the beach waiting as the incoming tide drove the birds up the beach towards me. The settings are ISO250, f8.0 and 1/1600th of a second shutter speed. It remains one of my favorite photos. I always try to catch some kind of behavior that reflects the bird and I think this one hits it. I was improving!

Going Mirrorless with the R5

With the extender, the 500mm became just too heavy to carry around the countryside. I was about to begin a new adventure taking photographs of birds while travelling in Australia so I traded everything in and took a big risk on new mirrorless gear. The double whammy was that the viewfinder is digital and I had never liked them when I had seen them before. Still, Canon hadn't let me down so far. I also invested in a 1.4 exender.

There is a lot to like about the Canon EOS R5 and it gives me the clarity I am always looking for. However there are some challenges. Without the extender the widest f-stop is 8.0 and with the extender, which I always use, it is f10. That is a big restriction. My ISO setting is now a minimum of 400 unless I am in really bright sunshine. The compromise is my shutter speed. I frequently cannot get to my desired 1/800 setting

The photograph below is the payoff, however. It is a Musk Duck, endemic to Australia. The protuberance on the face is a circular disk that sits under the mouth. This is a male bird in full courtship display and what I really like is that the face is in focus, as is the tail. Compare that to the wrybill above! The settings for this photo are ISO500, f9.0 and shutter speed 1/800th of a second.

Processing

I have been shooting in RAW format and using Adobe Lightroom to process my photos for some time now. It has become even more important with my new gear. I have found that Canon camera gear in general can be quite grainy and shooting with these new settings results in darker images needing more processing to lighten the images up. Take a look at these images of the Shy Heathwren. One is before processing and the other afterwards. I seem to be able to get away with under exposing but it is not very satisfactory. I will keep working at it.

Shy Heathwren

Next Steps

I am going to Costa Rica soon and cannot afford to waste any opportunity in my bird photography. It has given me the drive to start experimenting more with low light photography. Can I bump the ISO up to 2000 and higher? Can I use grain remover programmes like DeNoise? Do I want to spend all my time processing images that end up far removed from the original? I don't know. But I do know that I am going to enjoy learning about it all.

Conclusion

In 2019 I began uploading my best photos to Stock photography sites. I have been doing it ever since and if I was advising someone who wanted to start, I would say don't bother. It is a pain to upload the images and the payoff is not worth it. I only mention it now because my best selling photograph across all the Stock sites are the series of Kākāpō images I took right back at the start and are so technically dreadful. The lesson - spend more time putting effort into seeing great birds than photographing them.

Note: all the views and experiences are my own and I do not profess to be an expert in bird photography. Please get in touch if you have comments or questions. I'd love to hear them.

Imogen Warren