Bird photography in challenging light

welcome back to another video it's uh early morning and i've just crossed the uh northern belgium border into a private woodland in the netherlands and i'm just gonna walk about a kilometer deep into the forest and i'm gonna do a day's bird photography in a specialist height so come along with me and we'll see what we can get today oh [Music] so it's quite a walk but i've arrived at the hide which is just opposite me uh i'm just having a look at the surroundings whilst i'm here before i get settled in i've got to put some feed out see it hides well buried behind but uh yeah it's a beautiful spot pine trees a lot of pine trees there's kind of a clearing here there's a really nice autumnal feel to it lovely autumnal colors and a few evergreens around as well so what's great is there's bird boxes all around so nesting boxes and i can hear a lot of birds which is a great sign so yeah hopefully they'll come in and we'll get some good diversity today so i'm going to get settled in so well i haven't even put the feed down and i'm just getting my camera set up because it's better to get your camera set up before you put the feed down if you put the feed down and the birds come in and you're not ready so um yeah my cameras are set up and as i was doing that i've had a red squirrel nut hatch blue tits great tit black um starling i believe um what else did i have crested tit as well which is amazing i hope that the crusty tit comes back because i don't have a lot of images of crested tits at all in fact i think i've only viewed one sighted one maybe twice so yeah i mean this is obviously a private hut um and i think there's a photographer here yesterday so there's still a lot of feed down from yesterday and i think the birds are basically coming in and feeding on that even just as i'm stood here uh and it's a very wild area but even as i'm just in here these birds are very habituated um i mean there's a great tip that's literally 10 meters away from me on a branch just there he's just come right in front of me i mean i won't turn the camera because you won't see it but i guess it flies right right over my head so this looks really promising the challenge i've got now is actually putting out the feed in the right areas because obviously this is a reflection pool and uh i need to be very smart in how i do this because of the focal lengths so i'm shooting today with my lumix g9 i've got my 200 millimeter fixed f 2.8 i've got my 100 to 400 millimeter f 4 to 6.3 that's a very long focal length so right down the bottom end i'll get some good shots there but with the fixed i'm going to be limited so it's going to be a challenge to get any of the burs that come close in so i have to be a little bit smart now i do have a backup kind of like uh 14 to 140 lens that i can use but i prefer to use the uh the two kind of main wildlife lenses the the longer focal lengths so yeah we'll see how it goes it's it's looking very promising i'm super excited it's a it's a really really beautiful spot here if you look very carefully as i'm putting the feed out as i move to the left side of the reflection pool you can see a few birds that despite my presence come to the tree trunk that's on the right side of the reflection pool this was an excellent sign that this hut would be very active [Music] so it's been interesting um you can see inside here it's very dark and uh yeah i just picked the camera because there's a red squirrel um he's been here since i arrived and uh yeah he's basically sweeping up all the bird feed that i put out um but uh yeah the light is still quite quite difficult it's quite challenging obviously being in a pine forest majority pine forest what ambient light there is it's kind of being cut out by the tree canopy so um yeah some of the kind of species i'm really interested in that tend to move very quickly so nut hatch i absolutely love nut hatches and the crested tits which are coming in kind of quite close it's very very hard to to get images at the moment because i just don't have a fast enough shutter speed to be able to freeze the motion i got a couple of uh shots of an attach but nothing that's usable because i think i was about 60th of a second um and so just the slightest movement and no hatches kind of a little bit like kangaroos they bounce around so it's been a real challenge so yeah i'm just waiting a little bit now to get the light to come up a little bit more so i can kind of reduce my isos my shutter speeds can come up uh and then hopefully i can start getting some some good shots but uh the light is actually really good quality light it's homogeneous there's no kind of like uh shadows being cast so the reflection on the pool is is perfect um yeah so i'll try and film a little bit as the different birds come in with this camera and see if i can show you a little bit of diversity that i'm getting with wildlife photography there is always the temptation to take images you never know what will happen and so you can often push things to really try and get images you can see in this video clip the scroll isn't best positioned i have some clutter in the line of sight and i can't really get a clear angle on the subject the key is to bank your shots first you never know what will happen next but this red squirrel finally came into a location that i was hoping for where i could get a cleaner composition and a clear reflection and you can see that these images are a big improvement over the first image in the sequence [Music] so i've just uh gone out and put some more feed on the ground i'm using my iphone light hair because uh it's really dark i just took a wander around i had look up and the sky is quite gray so even though we're sort of now kind of mid morning i was expecting more light the realities don't really have a lot of light here so yeah it's been quite a fight to keep the shutter speeds up to get sharp shots which is always the problem with bird photography because you've got very fast moving subjects um but i've kind of been observing and photographing this morning and had some some really good sightings i believe i got a sparrow hawk come in twice uh first time i i mean he just came for a few seconds and uh flew off um i really wasn't expecting to see a bird of prey here with the red squirrel sequence of images i mentioned the concept of banking your shots well it's the same approach here first i took the still image and you can see by the time i've composed the focal length for a short video clip he'd flown away second time he came i was able to get a very short clip video clip and some shots and then he actually flew off onto another perch which was basically a log that's been been sworn down which was nice to see and then he flew off the second visit of the sparrowhawk he stayed a little bit longer and so i knew i had potentially three compositions the temptation really is to zoom in but with the first composition i wanted to use a slightly wider angle showing elements of the forest and also get the reflection there's a lot of negative space the second shot was really to get much tighter eliminate that reflection going for all that close-up detail [Music] and the final shot i flipped the camera into portrait orientation and included the reflection this last shot was all about timing hoping that you would get just one glance and that direct eye contact with the lens but yeah we had a great spotted woodpecker as well the crested tits have been back um so yeah it's been really good plenty of diversity the challenge has just been getting those shots with uh with the light right now so um kind of using a few a few tricks that i know so i'm trying to use my fastest lens where possible um so i haven't really broken out 100 400 today i i put it on very briefly um and at 400 millimeters f 6.3 i was kind of down to 80 180 of a second which just isn't going to be good enough for bird photography so i've been sticking to mainly the 200 millimeter um occasionally putting an extender on and i just want to get a little bit of extra reach and yeah i've been getting the peak i kind of got sort of uh 400th of a second which was reasonable uh but i've been underexposing as well underexposing helps me gain a little bit of shutter speed um so yeah it's been been a really good good morning so far i have a lot of spotted woodpecker images and here i was hoping to get a good shot with those autumnal colors unfortunately this bird was very skittish and didn't visit the hide often and when he did he didn't stay very long so this shot is much more of a proof shot than a portfolio shot but i'm glad i got it i've now just kind of observed the birds and where they actually feed and where they perch and seeing kind of what looks like a good shot and i've gone out and put a little bit more feed down in a few additional places where i'd really like to get some good shots because i'd like to either get a reflection or like to get the bird on a perch and so on so anyway i can see the birds are starting to come in they come in waves you get very quiet periods you get very busy periods and now i'm going to turn the camera off because there's like a seven or eight birds that just come down i was really spoiled at this hide for different species of tits the blue tits and great tits are very common here in northern europe but the cultit and crested tits less so they exist but they're not so easy to spot at this hide both coal and crested tits were abundant however it was the crested tit i was most interested in they are beautiful birds but they are super fast they fly in feed and fly out you have to react very fast as my portfolio doesn't have any crushed it to images in it this became a real mission for me during the session there were a number of great backdrops where the crested tit would land they seemed to come back to the same spots and so i just had to be patient then i got what for me was the shot of the day a crested tit bold enough to confront a blue tip that was feeding two different species in the same composition it was absolutely magical do [Music] not easy to get when they go up the tree let's come back there's some uh black birds that come in and they're very territorial they uh pretty much try and clear all the other birds it's a shame because i was just setting up to get a reflection shot of the woodpecker and i got scared off don't think i got it no i didn't get it [Music] so [Music] so that is i believe occult hit and he's just flown into the window he's not feeling particularly great and he's hanging there i think he's just trying to come around regain his senses one of my favorite birds is the nuthatch they have a distinctive body shape beautiful coloring and like the crested tip they move fast they tend to bounce and hop a lot so watching them at first is a good idea to anticipate how they will hop bob their beaks for food and then remain ever so slightly static before flying off again so then you just have a short moment to actually grab a shot on this day i was really struggling for light and as a result my shutter speed wasn't as fast as i wanted it to be i saw one nut hatch prepare to drink i anticipated and despite raising the iso to 1600 and under exposing my shutter speed was just 1 40 of a second i wasn't too hopeful but both images are acceptable they aren't perfectly sharp but under the circumstances they will do [Music] so i've decided to call it a day mid-afternoon the light's really a struggle today i've had a great day really enjoyed it been really challenging photographically trying to get the shutter speed fast enough to really get the shots sharp it's always a challenge with bird photography it would have been better i think if the cloud cover had lifted but it's been very grain overcast and we're in mid-november so yeah lights really at a premium but uh yeah if you just kind of anticipate pick your shots i think i've got some good ones i've included them in the video i do hope you have enjoyed this video and it's provided insights into bird photography during challenging light conditions if you did enjoy the video and want to help support my channel the best thing you can do is to like the video leave a comment and subscribe by doing so you will be helping my small youtube channel to grow many thanks for watching and see you at the next one

Channel: Jon Bryant

Views: 8,623

Keywords: wildlife, wildlife photography, birds, bird photography tips and tricks, bird photography camera settings, bird photography tips, micro four thirds, nature photography, nature photography tips and tricks, bird hide photography, outdoor photography, vlog, photography tutorials, photography tutorials for advanced, photography tutorials for beginners, bird hides for photography, wildlife tv, wildlife watching

Id: 48eeSUjhyio

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020