Experience the Joys of Shooting Birds (with your Camera)

Why shoot birds with an air-riffle when you can shoot them with your camera and enjoy their beauty forever? If you want to eat birds then KFC is the perfect place for that. If you are off to the forest to see exotic birds and enjoy their beautiful colors and witness how they gracefully fly in the air then, you should be hunting for their best opportunity to take their photos, not hunting them down.

Preparation for the Hunt

Just like hunting, taking photos of birds need some preparation. Let’s talk about the camera. Any low or high end Digital Single-lens Reflex (DSLR) camera will work well for outdoor wild life photography. Lenses that are 400mm or higher are perfect.

To get good pictures you have to get as close as possible to the birds. You have to wear something that will blend with the environment unless all you want to capture is their flight, away from you. Use the internet and check out some photos of the site so you can prepare your camouflage accordingly.

Capture their Natural Expressions

There is nothing like the close-up photo of a bird when he doesn’t know that he is being watched. It is the prefect picture of tranquility. For taking extreme-close up photos of a bird’s face, focus on the bird’s eyes. Use a camera with a macro lens anywhere between 50mm to180mm or a zoom lens that has macro mode. It is better to use manual focus because auto-focus may not be quick enough to capture the moment or silent enough to keep the birds calm and still. Use of a tripod is advisable to prevent blurring due to unsteady hands.

If you are going to take the photo of the full body of a bird, make sure that you take it at an angle where you can get a dark or neutral background so that that the colors of the bird will be emphasized. Between a background of trees and the empty sky, the empty sky will make the image of the bird pop out in your photo.

Catch their Motion in Flight

Photos of birds in flight are classics and they can never be overdone. The first thing that you have to remember is not to focus on clarity. For realism, the wings should be a little blurred because of their motion. Shooting them with shutter speeds of 1/25 to 1/25 seconds will produce a lot of blurred photos and will likely be disappointed. But, just keep on shooting because this setting will occasionally produce the best in-flight bird shots with blurred wings and a clear head.

Be Patient and Improve

The key to bird photography is to be patient. Your photos will be highly dependent on your subject. On your first trip to the site, you may not even come up with good bird photos. Consider it as part of the preparatory phase where you are just learning about the behavior of your subject and conditions of the environment.

Take as many photograph’s as you can because every time you do, you know a little more about yourself, your equipment and your subject. The best thing about bird photography is that is the only way of shooting birds without harming them. Go ahead and capture nature’s beauty and let your pictures serve as inspirations for others to do the same. After you have shot these beautiful photos, stop my Walgreens Photo to print them at extremely low prices!