7 Elements that make you a great Bird Photographer - Bird Photography Secrets Revealed - Jan Wegener

what's up guys welcome to a new youtube video if you're not a subscriber yet please hit that button now in my last video we looked at the seven elements of the perfect bird image and for today i thought let's look at what makes you a great bird photographer [Music] the most important thing for you to be a successful bird photographer is to know your birds you have to see a bird and instantly know what it is if you show me any bird of the world i will have a pretty good guess what bird it is and how i could take a photo of it the same is true for your listening listen to bird calls learn them and if you hear a bird in the field instantly know which bird it is it will also help you tremendously in identifying the birds and finding a strategy to get a good photo if you can't do either of the two it will actually be really hard for you to get nice bird images because you don't really know what bird you're dealing with and what its behavior is talking about behavior that's a really important point to study for you as well often i go out without my camera i'm just walking around with my binoculars studying birds especially when the light is not very nice walk around i look for new birds i see what are they doing are they always returning to a certain area and often they do kingfishers for instance they often return to the same perch every single day and instantly we find a fantastic photography opportunity because we can just set ourselves up next to nice perch and get some stunning kingfisher images a few years ago i was actually just on a walk with my binoculars and i heard fantail cuckoos in the distance so i followed the call found the birds actually big group of birds hunting on a sort of flooded field and what i noticed when i just sat down to witness the birds that they would always perch on little kind of twigs and sticks sticking out from the middle of the field so what did i do i found myself a few dummy perches stuck them up in the middle of the field and within a few minutes the cuckoo's actually started to use them that's pretty cool isn't it but i didn't then just run get my camera and got some ugly shots no i waited a few days returned with some really cool looking purchase set them up instead of my dummy purchase and within minutes the cuckoos landed on them and i got some stunning shots of them having even these cool funky looking caterpillars in their mouth pretty cool isn't it so don't always just go out to take pictures also spend a lot of time just learning about birds learning about their calls and just watching birds learning your behaviors and see if there's behavior patterns that you can take advantage of and i know it will benefit your photography greatly patience and perseverance and lots of it i know you will all know how frustrating it can be at times you see a bird you just can't get the shots you want and sometimes it takes hours days weeks even years until you get the shop that you actually want and i think this patience and perseverance is really what makes a great bird for them for instance major mitchell cockatoos region parrots and superb parrots that's birds i wanted for years tried and tried again and every time something else went wrong but then eventually i managed i persevered and i got the shots that i always dreamed of and i'm not a very patient person but i trained myself now when i'm outside i'll just forget everything else around me i just focus on my goal focus on getting that picture that i really want now stay with it and i sometimes spend days and days not even really thinking about the time i'm just out there trying to get the shots and when you get it in the end it's just the best feeling is using your creativity and developing your own style as a bird photographer nothing worse just having the same shot over and over and over again that you just see on the internet all the time as well find something that you like and that makes your images unique for me it's clearly having a bird and a beautiful pulse on a perfect perch with a really nice out-of-focus background that's what i love and that's what i aim for and that's what i really enjoy and that's what has become my style but for you it could be something completely different it could be silhouettes birds in flight birds in their environment really small in the frame what it is doesn't really matter but i think it's important that you aim to use your creativity to develop something that makes you stand out from the crowd so how do you develop your own style personally i just looked at all the images on the internet when i was younger and i just made a lot of folders with images that i really liked images that i didn't really like and i just studied them and i talked to people i contacted other photographers tried to find out what they do until i figured out what they were doing and learned how i could take nicer images better pictures and eventually develop my own style which it is today and on that note i think it's really important that you just reach out to people that you admire for instance i'm always open for questions if you have any questions about bird photography write it in the comments sent me a dm on instagram i don't mind i'm more than happy to discuss bird photography with you answer all your questions people have helped me in the past tremendously and so i'm more than happy to share what i know with all of you and help you to become better bird photographers [Music] i already talked about equipment in my last video seven elements of a great bird image but it's so important that i think we have to mention it here again and it doesn't really matter what equipment you use 100 to 400 a 300 600 millimeter lens 150 to 500 any sort of camera it doesn't really matter what's important is that you mask the equipment and you know how to use it without even thinking about it it shouldn't take you any time to change your eyes or change your shutter speed change your aperture it just needs to be second nature and your hands just need to know where to go why is that important because if you can't change your settings quickly you will be fumbling around with your camera missing shot so this is how i do i kind of have a benchmark for every weather situation that i just dial in check my histogram check what it looks like and then go from there and adjust the settings to get the perfect histogram so on the day like today cloudy i'm always thinking f8 400th of a second iso 1600 if it was sunny i'd probably go something like i saw 400 f 8 800 or thousands of a second i take your test shirts at these settings check my instagram and adjust it from there so essentially this is what i do turn on my camera put in the settings take a test shot of a light color tree check my histogram it looks great i'm ready to go that gives me an edge of everyone else because i can do it so fast and if you can't do it this fast i really recommend for you to just practice go out there with your equipment and master [Music] element number five that i find very important is research and preparation i never just go into any odd forest run around and try to get some bird pictures without knowing there's any birds there i spent hours and hours and hours on the internet on google in facebook groups looking at other people's pictures reading trip reports just to try and find out where i can get the best birds and the best photos so this is something that i think is crucially important and it's probably something people don't do enough you need to know that the birds are where you're gonna go or you will just get no shots this is something whenever i go somewhere like when i went to kanana to get golden finches i beforehand did a lot of research to find out where to get those shots black grassroom we found out where to get the shots when their founder birds got the shots major mitchell cockatoos same thing you find the areas you find the birds you get your shots it's the same for every bird be prepared i never go on any trip or any day without knowing that the birds that i want are in the area and that gives me a much higher success rate and will give you this is quite an interesting one editing images for some reason in nature photography it's seen as something undesirable and almost bad to edit your images whereas in every other genre of photography it's normal to edit your images and enhance them to get the absolute most out of them personally i think editing is needed but i like to edit my images as little as possible but as much as needed why do i think editing is important it's simple our human eye can see much more dynamic range than any camera sensor we can have over 20 stops that means a really bright area has details within our eye and the really dark areas we can see details at the very same time we're capturing such a high dynamic range image with your camera becomes a real challenge you need the perfect light and even then it's hard to get the details in the highlights and the shadows at the same time if you're exposing you get the most details in the dark areas you basically blow out all the highlights if you're exposing just for the highlights you end up with a severely underexposed image and losing details in the dark areas so we are severely limited by the capabilities of the camera sensor and why should we be happy with that this is where editing comes in instead of just being happy what the camera spits out at us we take our raw file adjust the settings in the raw converter put it into photoshop make some adjustments and enhancements and get fantastic images taking our images from good to great and this is what we really want to do we don't want to go in there and edit edit avid over edit edit everything out we don't want to blur our backgrounds that's a big no-no for me we just want to do enhancements to the scenes that we've captured to get the absolute most out of our images so to me as i said the editing process is an integral part of my whole photography process to get my images from a good level to an outstanding level and if you're not editing your images i really think you should be getting into thinking about it more learning about it and getting the most out of your shots in the future we'll actually be making a lot of videos about how to edit your bird images very soon so stay tuned subscribe to my channel let me know in the comments what do you think about the editing process is it too much is it integral to photography let me know and we can have a discussion and lastly you want to have some great social media and marketing skills everyone's on instagram facebook linkedin tick tock youtube this is where the attention is this is where you should be as well if you want to get your work seen and connect with people people these days they find you on social media they scroll through their feed they see your image they think wow that's amazing let's click on a profile see your account they follow you they connect with you they might message you this is how people see you these days and that's how you get seen so it's important to have images that stand out and you also want to specifically prepare your images for every medium you're posting on so on facebook doesn't matter as much what ratio you're posting but on instagram it's important to post either square or by four by five sized image because it takes up the most screen space on a phone and gets you images seen the most and people will stay longer on your image than an image that's really like a 16x9 crop that's just really narrow and people can flick past it really quickly social media is the place to be so get out there don't be scared ignore the haters take the nice comments and also take the constructive criticism incorporated in your work it will make you a better photographer and that's really helped me also as a hobbyist i think you can just get out there maybe post in an internet forum to get some more critique on the images that you can incorporate in your photography workflow there's no need to hide your images just on your hard drive where no one can see them get them out there connect on social media connect on social media with me if you haven't done that yet get your work out there get your work seen talk to people have fun and become a better photographer [Music] i really hope you enjoyed today's video and that i could give you some ideas to improve as a bird photographer let's recap number one know your birds you have to know the birds what they look like their calls and their behavior it will give you much more opportunities to become a great bird photographer and take great bird i mean secondly you have to have patience and perseverance it takes hours and hours and hours sometimes years to get that one shot you always wanted but once you do it's always worth it thirdly use your creativity and work on creating your own style as a photographer this is what will set your work apart and make it stand out from the crowd fourthly it sounds simple but it's very important that you master your camera and your gear doesn't even matter what gear you're using you just want to be the master of it and use it really quickly really efficiently to be able to just turn it on take the shot be ready to go at all times number five you want to do your research before you do trip before you go anywhere you want to spend some hours on google on social media on facebook finding out where the birds are so you know where to go number six you need to be able to edit your images to take them to the next level make sure they stand out from the crowd and they look the best they can look don't be happy with average images don't do straight out of camera don't blur your background use raw enhance your raw files put them into photoshop edit them up nicely and get the best results and lastly you want to be able to be good at marketing and social media spending lots of time there commenting posting connecting and engaging with other people to get your work seen get yourself known and to connect with other people to have a good time and maybe even make some money with your own photography i hope you enjoyed today's video please subscribe to my channel stay up to date with all my latest videos let me know in the comments have i missed the point is there any other points that can make you a great photographer didn't talk about which point do you agree on you disagree with some points what do you think about editing let me know give me thumbs up thanks for watching and i'll see you soon you

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 26,345

Keywords: bird photography, australia, vogelfotografie, jan wegener, birding, photography, birds, tutorial, equipment, exposure, manual mode, aperture, depth of field, wildlife photography, nature photography

Id: e9vqdo5moFs

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020