Nine basic skills of shooting birds

After being familiar with taking still photos of landscapes and portraits, students may also want to challenge to take some wild animals, among which taking birds is one of the animals that are easy to find, but this kind of photography subject also needs certain equipment and shooting skills. The following is the relevant content I have compiled. Let's have a look!

Photo by David Raspi.

(A) must use telephoto lens

Birds often fly in the sky, eat in the water, or rest in trees. To take a big and clear picture, you need a telephoto lens of 300mm, 400mm or even 800 mm. Students can start with some cheap 300mm telephoto zoom lenses (high-quality telephoto lenses are generally more expensive, but the imaging is excellent). Add a teleporter of x 1.4 or x2, and you will have a telephoto close to 600mm, but note that the maximum aperture will be reduced accordingly after adding the teleporter.

Beginners can shoot birds from cheap telephoto lenses and extended-range lenses.

(2) Don't turn the aperture to the maximum.

Although taking a shallow depth of field with a large aperture can blur the background, it is easy to make the depth of field shallow under a long focus (refer to the teaching of taking a shallow depth of field), and birds will move, so too shallow depth of field is easy to blur the subject. Therefore, f/5.6-8 aperture should be used when shooting birds to keep the depth of field within a reasonable range and highlight the subject.

When using telephoto lens, you can achieve obvious shallow depth of field effect without large aperture. The aperture used in this photo is f/5.6 and the focal length is 130mm. The photo was taken by jose carlos Nott.

(3) the shutter should be fast

In order to determine the shutter speed to be maintained according to the action of the bird to be photographed, a relatively fast shutter speed is usually used. For birds, it is relatively calm to capture their movements clearly at 1/800s or above. When birds are resting, it is best to keep the lowest shutter speed of 1/250s (if using telephoto, remember to meet the "safety shutter" to avoid hand shock.

Shooting birds in flight requires a fast shutter speed, so this photo was taken with a shutter of 1/800 s. The photo was taken by Cat Burton.

(d) Don't be afraid to use high ISO.

In the second and third points, we know that the aperture should not be too large and the shutter should be fast, so in order to get the correct exposure of birds, we need to improve ISO! Using high ISO in broad daylight will not obviously affect the photo quality, and now the denoising function of camera built-in or post-production software is also very mature, so don't be afraid to use high ISO! Adjust the appropriate ISO value according to the ambient light at that time. ISO800, 1600, etc. Enough for you to use a high-speed shutter!

(5) Make good use of "field measurement"

Generally, cameras also have three different metering systems, and the most commonly used one is "balanced metering". But in order to make the target bird have the correct exposure, we can adjust the camera to "spot metering" to keep the bird at the metering point, so that even if we shoot at the sky, the bird will not become underexposed. Note that when some cameras are set to Spot Metering, only the spot metering in the middle will be measured. Please test your camera first!

Using spot metering can make feathers have correct exposure. Photos taken by Jason Devaun

(6) Use continuous autofocus (AI-Servo/AF-C) and intermediate autofocus.

For birds, we can make good use of the camera's "continuous autofocus" function (AI-Servo/AF-C), or turn on AF multi-point area focusing or autofocus, so that the camera will automatically keep the focus on birds. Note that the speed and accuracy of focus tracking are related to the level of the camera. Usually, the focusing ability in the middle of the camera is also the strongest, so students can put the bird in the middle and then use the cropping function to make a second composition.

(7) Shooting original documents

The RAW file is the most tolerant of light and shade, and sometimes the white feathers of birds will be slightly overexposed or underexposed. We can also use the "highlights" and "shadows" of RAW editor for lossless correction. Teaching: Learn to use original documents.

(8) Know your target bird.

Students may wish to learn about the habitat habits, predation location, time and behavior of the target birds on the Internet first, so as to capture their beauty more accurately.

Knowing your target bird will give you a better chance to take pictures. Photo by Etienne

(9) Use a monopod

It's easy to get tired with a heavy lens and fuselage. You might as well use a monopod, which can not only reduce the weight, but also make the camera more stable, which is very helpful for shooting birds!

Using a monopod can make it easier for you to take stable photos.