20 Tips for Better Bird Photography

if you love bird photography and you're not getting the shots that you know you should be you've invested in the gear you have the technical knowledge but there's just something off well i'm going to give you a bunch of tips today hopefully correct some of the things that are going wrong with your bird photography and the first one's pretty simple shoot at a higher shutter speed you're not shooting at a high enough shutter speed the rule of thumb is to shoot twice your focal length in shutter speed so if you have a 600 millimeter lens like this giant beast or if you're using a teleconverter you're going to want to double that 600 and have a at least a 1250 shutter speed so more like 2000 or 2500 if you're talking about birds in flight and whatnot the faster the better really when you want to freeze that action but if you're still not getting sharp photos some other things could be to blame and one of those things is image stabilization that's right we pay all this money for image stabilization in our big expensive lenses and sometimes it's not doing what it's supposed to do if you have a stationary subject and you're using really high shutter speeds sometimes your lens is going to try and compensate by using image stabilization giving you a really weird result so try turning off your image stabilization and see if your results improve that's my first tip and can drastically improve your images when it comes to birds in flight stationary stuff if you're getting kind of a weird hazy or a motion blur look check your image stabilization and go from there so it's a bit cold out here today and that's not really a bad thing other than being a little bit uncomfortable your pictures are always going to be better in the cold for the most part because one of the things that ruins a lot of photos that you might not realize is heat distortion and that's when it's too hot and it rises off the ground giving you kind of a wavy or distorted look and you might mistake that your lens or your camera is doing something wrong where it's just heat waves in the air so come out and shoot during the cold days that's when you're going to get probably the crispiest pitchers just make sure you dress for it dress warm and you're going to be nice and cozy definitely wear some gloves but yeah come prepared my next tip might sound self-explanatory but sometimes it's just not possible here we are we're at the beach we've got some overcast and we've got the sun right in front of me and unfortunately that's where the birds are going to be so i have to shoot towards the sun but in most cases you want to be shooting with the sun to your back shoot towards your shadow and that's going to let the detail of the birds come out with the light but again sometimes you just can't control that and it does make a huge huge difference so always remember to shoot towards your shadow so some days you're just not going to have a lot of action and today's one of those days the birds that i would want to photograph are so far that it's just pointless so i'm going to be patient and i'm going to wait but make sure you have your settings dialed in so that you're ready when something does happen if you deviate if you're cranking down your shutter speed and then you have something fly by and you're not ready you can miss the shot so the best thing is to visualize what you're looking for really get that shot in your mind and what it's going to require then be patient and you're ready to shoot it when it does happen my next tip is to shoot at eye level shooting at a bird's eye level is really important to get a more intimate picture shooting down or up can look a little bit funny but it is hard to get right at eye level especially here when you consider i'm on a bit of a hill and i'm going to have to get really really low into the mud so try and really be prepared with whatever you bring don't always wear the best clothes and stuff and prepare to get dirty if you really want the best shot if it's possible always try and focus right on the bird's eye that's the most detail and the thing that we're really drawn to the most when it comes to a lot of living subjects actually but birds tend to have awesome eyes whether they're crazy colors or just an incredible amount of detail the eye is definitely what you want to focus on unless you're really trying to accentuate a feature in this specific bird so if you can if you don't have eye autofocus for animals on your camera try and maybe get down to a single point auto focus and always shoot for the eye next up if you can utilize a tripod now you don't have to have the biggest most expensive thing this is just a little light travel tripod that i like to bring around with me and it has a fluid head on top and that's really all you need to be able to take away some of the camera shake that you might get when you're hand holding but at the same time don't always shoot with a tripod it's really not great for when you have to act quick or if you have to shoot from one side to another or if there's birds in flight it can be really tricky to get that shot when you need it so depending on the shot that you're looking for decide at the time do i want to be utilizing a tripod or not commit to it and then maybe later you can switch it up but don't try and do everything because you're probably just going to mess up and miss the shot so with nature you're really going to have it cooperate and do exactly what you want and that goes for light too which just happens to be one of the most important aspects of photography so ideally you want to shoot in soft light so first light and last light of the day is ideal but you don't always want to be out necessarily at midday sun it can be really harsh and give you some really nasty shadows so aim for shooting at the beginning of the day the end of the day and even on a cloudy day you can get some really great results when it's a bit overcast think of the clouds as like a big soft box it's really going to give you a nice soft look and in a lot of cases turn out a lot nicer than beautiful midday summer sun like i said which can go with heat waves and distortion problems now while we're on the topic of things you can't control your background can sometimes be one of those things but a lot of the time just by moving up or down or left or right we can really change our background and our subject and our composition completely so one of the most important things that i will say to you in bird photography is really pay close attention to your background and then if need be shift again forward backwards front back or if you can change the entire perspective and move around to a better spot so that your background is going to look a lot nicer when it comes to higher isos a darker background is going to show significantly more noise than a lighter background so consider that too but again it's not always in our control just something to be aware of sometimes you just have to accept that you're not going to get the best pictures in fact i've been out for a few hours now and i've taken just a handful of photos none of which i'm really happy with so sometimes it's just not going to work out but doesn't mean tomorrow isn't going to be fantastic at the exact same spot if you find yourself on a walk and it's a new place to you and you see people that might be there regularly maybe ask them i've had people come up to me and tell me hey did you know there's an owl that comes here every night at exactly 6 15 and sits in this tree and i'm like no i didn't and i came and there it was so i got some great photos just by talking to some locals and seeing what actually pops up on a daily basis a lot of animals are routine oriented so they're going to repeat the same process and do the same things over and over you just have to kind of crack that code and discover when and where that's going to be now for me personally my shooting style i like to be as mobile as i can i don't really use a tripod that often i want to be as quick as i can to be able to change and adjust as need be there are some things ergonomically that you can utilize and do to give you more stability and get sharper and better photos one is really utilize your strap i've got the peak design strap here and i like to really dial it in so that it's comfy and close to my body so i can almost use it as an anchor to basically bring it as close to my center of gravity as i can so everything's just really stable from there be really careful with your button presses and there's things that you can do as far as just finding points of contact to really just have a really solid feel so pick up your camera it might be heavy and you can only do it for so long because well you fatigue after a while so get comfortable with your camera and your lens again bring it as close as you can to your body utilize your straps as an anchor and press that shutter button as light as possible even little things like that can make a big difference when it comes to the sharpness of your photos now i shouldn't have to say this but i'm going to anyways have some respect for nature and also for your fellow photographer if you see somebody be kind share your experience share your knowledge but yeah definitely don't overdo it don't try and get within three feet of the bird and really push it and ruin it for everybody else and definitely don't over extend and go places where you're really not supposed to be like nests like off the road where you're supposed to stay on and stuff like that we've all seen people do it just don't be that guy get as close as you can we've got awesome lenses but again show some respect to the animals and of course the people don't be a jerk if they're asking you questions and stuff this is all about sharing it's the art of photography it doesn't belong to anybody so be kind guys and yeah that's all i'm going to say about that so i've said it before and i'll say it again don't be scared to shoot in higher isos our sensors are more than capable and a little bit of noise isn't going to kill you you already know now if you can to shoot with a lighter background rather than a darker one if you have to shoot in higher isos but let's head back to the studio now and i'll show you my process at how you can quickly get rid of some of that grain if you do have to shoot in the higher isos so here we are back in the studio in adobe lightroom and i'm going to show you my workflow some really quick tips and tricks to get your higher iso images cleaned up and looking great as you can see here it's the last light of the day and we're shooting at 2500 iso and we've underexposed the image just a little bit and my first tip is to always underexpose rather than over expose your image because it's easier for your camera sensor to retain image in an underexposed photo rather than an overexposed photo so let's go ahead and hit auto here and see what lightroom wants to do and yeah it's going to overdo it of course as usual so we'll bring that down to a reasonable level another thing to be careful of is your shadow slider here and shadows are a great way to bring back some of the detail but unfortunately when shooting in higher isos it's going to come with a lot of loss of quality in those shadow areas so be aware of that and in a lot of cases you probably don't need all that detail so keep your shadows more natural looking a lot of the times i'll actually go into the negative just to kind of give it a more natural look so be aware of your shadow slider in that regard but the first thing i usually do when i edit any photo is to cruise down to the profile correction here in lens corrections and enable that profile correction what this is going to do is get rid of any vignetting and distortion that your lens produces just cleans it up a little bit you can also remove any chromatic aberration that might be kicking around in there so let's head back up and i'll show you my go-to to reduce noise especially in the background here because as you can see at 2500 iso it's quite noisy and really doesn't look that good what you can do is grab the brush adjustment tool here and head down to the texture slider crank that thing all the way down to minus 100 and just start painting and i'm going to show you a quick example of this and as you can see in real time it does a fantastic job of getting rid of some of that noise just blending it into the background really making it look like a photo that was taken at a much lower iso and let's show you the difference right there and as you can see down the middle it's a huge difference just by using that texture slider for the sake of time i'm just going to go around our whole subject here and get rid of as much of that noise in the background that i possibly can but i don't want to necessarily spill over onto our subject because we're going to lose detail if you do end up spilling over you can just hold the alt button and just subtract what you've already done to kind of give it a nice look in the background but still keeping that detail on your actual subject here so the next thing we want to do is bring out some of the detail in our subject let's bring back some of that sharpness if we can so naturally you might want to just cruise down to your sharpening slider here and crank that thing right up but as you can see here wow it wants to do it to the entire image and it doesn't look very good there is a little bit of a preview window to show you just how extreme you're going to be but in this case i really don't want to crank it up to 100 like anything in lightroom cranking up anything to its highest in lightroom can really make a photo look just over edited overdone and that's just not what we're going for in most cases so as you can see here we don't want to sharpen the entire image and there is a solution for that instead of tediously masking out every little thing we can go down here to the masking slider hold alt and then go over to the right a little bit and what this is doing is showing you where it's actually going to mask in this sharpening so in this case i really only want to sharpen my bird and really not too much either so now you can play with your sharpening slider and it's only going to sharpen what you saw in your masking tool there a great feature now naturally one of the first things that you might want to do is run down here to your noise reduction tab and crank that thing up but again it's going to do it to the entire image and we're going to lose detail and quality in our subject so i don't recommend doing that or using that slider unless you're in a really big hurry and definitely not up to 100 so if you need to use a little bit as you go but for the most part those other tools are my go-to and i think look pretty good let's have a look at a before and after here to show you the differences with just a few clicks and some sliders pretty big difference if you ask me especially when it comes to the noise we can definitely do a bit of cleaning up there but for the most part i'm happy with it and i hope it helped so let's leave it at that my friends i hope you liked this video and i hope like me you enjoyed just getting out here in nature and shooting birds shooting everything if you like this video guys consider hitting that like and subscribe button join the community and like always make mistakes be yourself and get out here and take some more pictures see you next time

Channel: Stefan Malloch

Views: 25,010

Rating: 4.9702382 out of 5

Keywords: photography, stefan malloch, bird photography, bird photography tips and tricks, bird photography tips, bird photography for beginners, bird photography gear, bird photography tutorial, bird photography settings, bird photography editing, 20 bird photography tips, bird photo editing, birding, birding photography tips, easy bird photos, easy bird photography, tips for bird photos, tips for bird photography, bird in flight, birds in flight, birds in flight photography

Id: u8JnESuU0_c

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021