Backyard Bird Photography Studio

oh hey i think they're here already no way really oh my gosh you guys are here early that's all right so for today's video we're going to talk about our backyard bird photography studio it's really easy and a great way to photograph uh our feathered friends in the backyard so we're going to talk about our blind we're going to talk about our feeding station the purchase we use we're going to show you exactly how to do it so stay tuned it's going to be a great video make sure you subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you know when we upload new videos stay tuned making backyard bird pictures like this is actually surprisingly easy so in today's video we're going to show you exactly how to do this from the bird feeding station to the blind to actually picking the purchase to make these beautiful kinds of pictures all right so here we are at the feeding station so here's our blind um and there's a few major considerations about setting up a bird feeding station so number one it's it's location right location's super important so there's the first thing we need to consider is the light okay so the blind is set up so the sun comes up from the viewer's perspective on the left sweeps across the sky and sets on your right that way the the light is falling on the birds for most of the day okay now depending on your situation you may only be able to set up so you have light on the birds in the morning which is fine or just bird light on the birds on the afternoon or in some scenarios if you have trees and things you need to photograph on cloudy days when it's not real contrasty right but make that your first top consideration okay then as we come to our feeding station over here there's some considerations there as well okay here's our here's our feeding station so we've got a couple feeding stations we're going to zoom in and talk more about the blind and the feeding station later but i want to give you the big overview first so location's important here first consideration is backgrounds we want to have nice out-of-focus backgrounds when we focus on the perch we want the backgrounds to go nice and out of focus so we want to have some distance between our our shooting perch and the background so uh we get to get those nice backgrounds the next consideration is our subject's comfort right if you look off to the right of the feeding station there's heavy woods and shrubs and brush and things birds that's comfortable to the birds they feel safe in there so we want they they stack up in that in that shade and they fly from that comfort onto the perch and that's when we take their picture okay if you don't have a situation like this i have friends who have taken old christmas trees and just put them in a stand next to the feeding station so the birds have some cover clothes that helps them to feel comfortable all right the last thing is the distance from the feeding station to the blind all right we're in a blind so we don't have the ability to move closer or further away as the subject changes right so we want to shoot i shoot with a zoom lens when i'm in a blind that gives me the ability to zoom in for a chickadee and zoom out for a cooper sock right so nicole and i shoot with our 200 to 400 in the blind we're on a cropped camera and we have our distance set up 16 feet away that way we can do a full-frame chickadee or zoom out for a full-frame cooper's hawk okay super important so next we'll move in and we'll talk about the blind and show you how our permanent blind is built and then after that we'll go in and do the feeding station okay so once again here's our permanent blind all right um it's made out of tongue and groove siding and two by four construction the floor is just it's set on top of gravel i put a fl a plywood floor in it but it was really simple construction uh covering the the shooting area is just a piece of camouflage netting that we just nailed onto the front of it super easy construction works really really well i'll show you a peek inside here next all right so let's take a look inside hey look there's a call hello so here's the inside of it um pretty basic construction it's just four walls really with a shooting port we built a shooting deck here out of a two by eight uh we've got a quarter by 20 bolt coming up through that uh that way we can mount our ball heads our gimbal heads on there works really well really well we don't have to worry about a tripod in here um we've got a uh the ceiling is just made out of corrugated plastic which works really well really well let some light in and uh we've got a window in here so we can see what's going on behind us nicole had me put bars on here because this is my timeout area yeah although i don't know that that's such a punishment but yeah i get on trouble on purpose a lot so um pretty easy now obviously a lot of people are not going to want to build a permanent blind right you're not going to do something like this on your property but if you want to use uh the portable blind at the end of this video is a link to a talk we did all about portable blinds which is which are a great option for this kind of shooting as well all right so here's our feeding station so um it's basically three elements all right first off we have our feeder our main feeder and um it's just filled with hulled sunflower seeds and then we have two places on the top to put um mealworms and uh a special soot mix that we make and we'll put a link to that soot mix in the uh or that recipe in the description as well all right then off to uh the viewers left is the woodpecker perch this is where the woodpeckers come in and then at the top of that we have sootcakes right so the birds come in they land on the perch they hop up they eat the soot all right and then off to the to nicole to our right is the perch okay this is how things look every day um this is how the birds see it every single day this perch is always here this big feeder is always here and this woodpecker pole is always here so the birds come from the cover on the right they sit on the perch they make sure everything's safe then they dive in and they get the food the woodpeckers come in they land on that post they hop up they know where the soot is they get the soot this is how we do it every single day all day this is what the birds are used to looking at now when we photograph we change things up dramatically okay so when we photograph this is how we we change everything up okay first off we've taken that big old giant feeder down we've replaced it with a small cup all right that way only one bird can get on that cup at a time that means there's going to be a line formed and that line form is going to form on our perch that we've put up okay and then we've taken the unattractive post down where the woodpeckers go and we put up a more attractive post for the birds to uh for the woodpeckers to sit on right now we're going to each of these individual elements alrighty so the main seed feeding station is just an old peanut butter jar lid with a post glued on the bottom of it that slides right into a hole we bored into the 4x4 post on the bottom it just fits right in there this this same little post is on the bottom of the feeder so i just pull the feeder off and put this little thing on there once again having a smaller feeder forces only one bird to get to the seat at a time and then a line forms on our perch off to the right okay the woodpecker station same thing we've taken that ugly log that they're used to sitting on all the time and we put up the photogenic log that they're going to photograph this is just mounted i just there's a hole dug into drilled into the bottom of the post and i drilled a spike a landscaping spike into the 4x4 post and that landscape spike just goes up onto this this perch and um and then i've taken the suitcase and just velcroed those onto the top of this uh to the top of this beautiful post for the land for the woodpeckers it works really well everything's based on four by four posts i've got squirrel baffles on everything uh you can just put these into the ground or i've got i found some stands on on amazon that work really really well all right then lastly this is our stage we've taken away that ugly stick that's on the on the perch all the time that the birds are used to seeing and we've replaced it with a more photogenic uh stick for the burst to sit on all right we're using a plant to hold the uh the perch and these things are really wonderful they're totally flexible uh articulating arms with a clamp on each end and you can clamp one onto your post and clamp one onto the perch and they'll hold it in any position that you want they work really really well now perches are the absolute key and the creative part of doing backyard photography this is where you get to be creative and make the pictures that you want to make so next we're going to go into we're going to show you some of our images and some of the perches that we use and talk about the different perches this is where the real artistry of this is so we're going to have a a slideshow and show you some images and some birches and how to select a great perch so the purchase as we mentioned earlier the perches are everything in this this is where we get to put our own artistry into the work you guys will probably recognize this perch this was the the woodpecker post that nicole and i put up in the in the uh in the video earlier so for the woodpecker purchase we're just looking for for many of the woodpeckers like this downey there's not going to be a lot of the perch so we just want to have some texture and some color and something that's going to really set off the bird really well and we're looking for good good poses uh we're lucky enough to have a couple pileated woodpeckers that come in and i like that this perch is a little smaller right it's not a really super thick perch you can see all the way around the branch and it really shows off the size of the bird pretty well plus there's interesting texture and uh bark patterns on it that really really show it off well so for this image of this nut hatch this is one of the fun things about sitting and doing this from a blind this isn't cropped at all this is exactly how i shot it through the camera and i mentioned having a uh a zoom lens this is super handy for this so a lot of times when a cooper's hawk or something like that comes into the yard most of the birds will ditch into that cover so they feel safe some birds like nut hatches a lot of times downies will just freeze and that's what this guy did so this was actually like a quarter of a second exposure at f 16 and i was just able to zoom in really tight get it exactly how i want it and then of course we've got that wonderful depth of field from that super stop down situation so for the song birds perches are a little different right we've gotta we we've gotta pick something pretty for the for the bird to sit on and there's usually going to be a little bit more going on in the picture of the bird but what we want to do is we want to we're making a picture we want to think about where the bird is going to set right and this was exactly where i wanted this little chickadee to sit on this milkweed i had this whole picture in my head and i knew the milkweed was going to fill up the right hand part of the frame and then it's just a matter of sitting there waiting for the bird to get in the right spot and give you a good position and sometimes that takes a long time um but the artistry really is in the purchase so um you're the carolina run these guys are little posers uh his tail up like that they just really love to pose all the runs that sit really well okay seasonally a red breast did not hatch on a pine bough one of the tricks is leave your purchase out in the weather so they get covered with snow and ice and and give you more of a story right and you can even sprinkle a little snow on your purchase if you're shooting in winter uh nicole and i photograph the birds a lot in the winter winter is one of our favorite seasons to photograph because the birds look great plus they come in more they're at the feeders more because they're if there's snow on the ground all of their food is covered in snow and obviously um it makes for some dramatic and cool pictures um so some perches are easier than other persons this is a difficult perch right this bird it's hard to get this bird he's got to sit in just the right spot it's pine needles so they're not really comfortable sometimes you got to spend a lot of time to get the birds to sit in just the right spot so if you're doing just a like and cover branch obviously that's going to be an easier perch to get a bird to sit on um you know and again having that zoom lens having that ability to zoom in for a chickadee and pull back for a bird like this blue jay really uh increases your opportunities to shoot different birds at different different situations again we love the photograph in the winter because that's when the birds look great get out when it's snowing you know that's part of the story make sure you're out there uh working the seasons okay but get out at the other times of the year you know you get a whole different set of backgrounds right our backgrounds have more color in the spring obviously the birds are in these goldfinches look pretty drab in the winter season um and goldfinches like this they will sit together they come in in a flock of five or six a lot of times you'll get one or two or three on a perch at a time right these are just apple blossoms think about where the birds are gonna sit ten the the birds are typically gonna sit towards the higher end of the perch okay so think about that think about that in your composition when you're when you're selecting your perch okay another difficult perch uh was this fern frond right it's kind of flimsy so birds don't sit on a lot so we we invested a lot of time trying to get this bird sitting here now typically i said earlier that the birds will go to the to the highest point but because the highest point of this fern frond is going to be super flimsy this chicken he knows that right so he's going to sit back where the stock's a little uh thicker and is going to support his weight a little bit better then of course um in the springtime we've got beautiful flowers that we can photograph the birds onto so um next thing we're going to talk about is the uh another option for a blind that people don't think about actually photographing out of your house that's coming up next here's an idea you all live in a big blind that's absolutely right set up a feeding station outside of a window or outside of a door wall by your home and you can shoot right outside the window i have a lot of buddies who photograph this way it's a great way to do it just think about the three things make sure you got light that you can use to photograph make sure that you've got some cover in the area so the birds feel safe and keep an eye on those backgrounds in our next video we're going to show you our in-ground blind complete with reflecting pool which is how we made all of these images it's really creative and cool so make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you can be informed when we upload a new video thanks you

Channel: Steve Gettle

Views: 22,608

Keywords: Nature photography, backyard birds, backyard bird photography, songbird photography, bird photography

Id: 4gdIwpuWizA

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020