Ever wished to capture cool Birds pictures on your an adventure in the wild? Here I am going to share three tips that I learnt while taking pictures outdoors. Bird’s photography is usually challenging because they move very fast and most of the times hides into dark places under the trees or bushes or even high in the sky that make lighting complicated.
Going for an overcast day is better
Taking pictures on a sunny day generates huge contrast, to avoid this, I recommend going on a cloudy day where the contrast diminishes and the light is softer.
Use a high ISO
When the light is low on a cloudy day, it is generally dimmer than on a sunny day. Therefore, increasing your ISO is going to give you great results. In this case, after few practices I realized that even though birds move fast you do not need to have a higher shutter speed.
A clean background is important
Due to the fact that you will be taking pictures in an Aperture priority mode, there’s a little bit more time to adjust the composition. A neat and clear background will retain the viewer’s attention. Below is picture with distracting background even if i managed to capture the bird.
Wow, these are awesome tips! Thanks so much for sharing, these will come in handy. I love the photos and I’m lucky enough to have seen both the African fish eagle and mousebird back home. Where did you take the photos?
Great post with priceless advice! Since I am very new at taking good quality photos, could you please share the number of the f-stop for taking these pictures? You also say to use high ISO, perhaps 800? What do you think?
The African Fish Eagle was captured in March 2018 and then I managed to get the mouse bird two weeks ago in my Garden, The Mouse Birds have such a different and Hilarious call, it sounds as if they laughing at you.
800 for the ISO is okay, but i like to use an ISO 1600, Even if it gives a bit of noise on the background, which is okay and easily removable. but i like to capture the atmospheres and i use an f/6.3.
You will also have to consider whether you are holding the camera or using a tripod. I used a Sony NEX-5N. values may differ a bit if your using higher Cameras.
I don’t have a tripod yet and I recently bought a Nikon D3500 camera which is considered to be a good device for a beginner in photography.
How do you remove the noise if I may ask? Do you edit your photos? Usually, I fix the brightness but I don’t do some major changes. If I don’t like the photo, I just delete it and try again.
The Nikon D3500 is an Excellent choice, You will still be able to take amazing quality pictures hand held.
I utilize adobe lightroom to reduce the noise whenever the background contains no details. Because with noise reduction you also loose picture details. I think your technique is the best, to take multiple pictures and select the best without the need of editing afterwards.
I’m not a fan of Photo retouching so i only correct the Light and colors.
To make good birds photography most important is a good Teleobjektive with 400, 600 or 800 mm fixed! Zooms make less quality.
With a 400 you can still make photos without a tripod.
If you go with iso to much high the quality gets less from composition. You loose buquet in this. Yours best photo is the bird you did rate as worst. Because you see the eye. You need to set yours focus to the eye and set the sharpness to 5 cm before and behind and rest you put to the budget. At least this photo done with iso 100 will give you with the right cam ca teleobjective the contest winning picture. Also set the blend to 5,5 to 8.
