Bird Photography with my Canon R6 - Kingfishers, Babblers, Kangaroos & More!

[Music] well g'day and welcome to the channel in today's video i'm going to share with you exactly how i went about getting the shot of a sacred kingfisher if you're new to the channel i'm a bird photographer and i'm based in the state of victoria in australia so this is a natural watering hole where the birds come to drink but as it dries out this water evaporates and it disappears so one good strategy is if you know there's somewhere that birds will drink and then it dries out you can just simply take water there and the birds will be drawn to that location all right so i came down yesterday afternoon just to top this up with some water and i actually disturbed a couple of sacred kingfishers i've got that bucket perch set up and we're just going to attach a couple of perches to it and hope that the kingfisher lands on there and also a lot of the birds i come from the bush and they'll bounce along here down here down so what i'm going to do is attach a couple of perches off fallen logs and hopefully a bird will actually land on that before going to the water so the supplies i've got with me today is a heap of perches i've picked up from around the property that i'm going to cable tie to my bucket perch and to these fallen logs you can use wire as well the cable ties is just easier for me and the old milk crate that i'm going to put a rock on top of okay so i'm going to lift up this rock and take it over hopefully it's not too heavy put this milk crate by the water where the birds like to drink so what i'm hoping is the birds will sort of come from here onto here and then down to the water and because i've lifted it up off the ground we're gonna have far better background separation than if they were just on the rock itself so that's one of the keys is to try and get your perch up towards eye level it'll make your backgrounds much nicer now we just need to attach perch to here and a perch to there and maybe another perch to the bucket and we should be good okay gonna try and find somewhere that's gonna sit naturally like that so i'm really happy with these three perches now so i've already got this perch here which i quite like it's got a nice shape to it so if the bird lands on here it'll be really good and i'll just give them one more option a little bit lower down so if they drop to the water we'll go somewhere like here there is a bit of faffing about i must admit when you're setting these things up you have to have a bit of time on your side to mess around with it all right that's good hopefully the kingfish will land on this one or this one before it drops down to have a drink everything's set up now we've got one two three four five six different perches for these birds to land on we've got the water um so i'll leave this here i'll go home i'll let them get used to it and hopefully when i come back this afternoon they'll start landing on these perches and we'll get some good shot [Music] well i'm back so it's just coming on seven o'clock it's about 38 degrees or 100 degrees fahrenheit so it's still pretty hot so the sun's just coming down i need to get set up get ready and get prepared i've got my drink bottle because i'm going to be sweating a lot i'm going to be using this bag hide to hide myself from the birds so today i'm going to be using my canon 500 f4 lens i've got a 1.4 converter that gives us 700 millimeters focal length and i'm using the canon r6 mirrorless camera so this is the combination that i'm going to be using today and i'm basically just going to be sitting in the blind and waiting for the birds to land on those perches that i set up this morning so i've waited for the sun to go down so that we've got no major shadows it's all going to be one colored background and you can see on the perch that i've got set up here the background's just going to be the same color so we shouldn't have too many issues now we're not going to have a lot of light but we'll have a consistent background and that's what i'm after so still got plenty of water here that i've put it i've put the water down for here the birds are going to come here that rock hopefully they'll land on and then these perches that i've set up now i've just got to get myself sorted in my blind so we'll set that up so i've got a seat obviously the nice comfort i just need to lower my tripod down so i can sit and see comfortably and get my drink bottle and we'll be right to go ideally it wants to be about head height so i don't have to look down but i still want to be able to see over the camera so i can see the birds when they arrive about this looks good to me i can see very good angle so this is a good height i'm happy with this now just this blind which you'll ask me about i'll put a link in the description um i got it from naturescapes so and basically it just goes over the front of your lens like so so it's just got velcro on either side and velcro that's that and then i will go underneath it you can sort of see through it um but it's not all that clear but i can undo this if i want to see a little bit better and i can look through it or eyes i can hear babblers [Music] [Music] do so now it's just the waiting game waiting to see whether a bird turns up lands on your perch and whether you're fast enough to focus on it take some shots before it moves on [Music] a common bronze wing quite a natural scene i like that i really like the shot very natural of it [Music] well that was an amazing session i just had with those kangaroos uh we didn't have the best light so the iso was fairly high so it'll be a good test for the r6 to see how it performed really actually just enjoyed watching them you know these are very wild kangaroos so they are not tamed by any stretch the kingfishers didn't turn up unfortunately but that's the way it goes we had a few other birds turn up i was really happy with the common bronze wing you know setups are really really fun and really really good but it's very hard to get them looking completely natural and i got a shot of a common bronze wing as it was just walking and over on this um dried out moss and i think i got a really nice shot and one that you just couldn't reproduce with a setup i don't think and look we've got a few other little birds landed on the perches i set up so overall it's a really productive session uh what time is it it's 20 past eight the sun's well and truly gone down so it's time for me to pack up and head home so i might come back tomorrow evening and do the same thing and hope that the kingfishers turn up well i'm back for day two let's hope i can get the kingfisher today [Music] all right let's get set up for day two it's kind of the beauty of um coming to water is that it's exciting because you never know what you're gonna get you never know what's gonna turn up it's always going to be different you know you might get something you've never shot before i've got birds turning up already [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well that brings an end to day two here at the the hide so i've got mixed emotions at the moment um it was really successful so the kingfisher turned up i got some kingfisher shots hopefully they turned out all right but as soon as i started photographing that kingfisher i wanted to get some video and i've fumbled with the dial it takes five turns to get the video and i don't want to disturb the bird so i thought i'd do it through the viewfinder and basically the camera crashed it just locked up and i couldn't take any photos i couldn't get off video so i've turned the camera off i've taken the battery out put the battery back in turned it back on and it was still frozen i got an error saying that it couldn't read the card the card era format the sd card so i've turned the camera off swapped the sd cards taken the battery out put it back turned it back on like all i could see was the actual live view there's no focus point i couldn't take any photos 10 seconds or so the camera's obviously reset itself or something's happened and the af points have come on i've captured a tiny bit of video and then the bird's gone so very frustrating trying to deal with a camera that's frozen and won't take photos while you've got a bird directly in front of you perhaps the sd card is faulty however i've been using it on this camera you know i've taken 5000 photos on this sd card i did get a few photos before it locked up and then i had a magpie land in the background here and it was walking around in the grass and i got a lot of shots and i think i actually quite like those shots we'll see how they turn out but some of those habitat shots are quite nice and that's what i'm sort of trying to get you know i can do all these setups i can put all these perches here sometimes the nicest shots are just the ones that happen in front of you um oh the kangaroo is back with the i think it's the same one from last night [Music] well i must be a sucker for punishment because i've come back again three days in a row it's just gone eight o'clock it's so hot i've sweated probably liters so i just want to touch on the camera locking up it i tried to use that memory card again and it locked up again on me today fairly quickly so it's clearly an issue between that card and the camera so i've used a sandisk card for the rest of today and i didn't have an issue at all i'm happy to know that it's likely to be just that sd card and not the camera i'm not sure if you've had any problems with lexar cards in your r5 or r6 maybe just leave it in the comments but today the camera performed really really well and i got some amazing shots of a white brow babbler it actually landed on that rock that i put on top of the milk crate so i was able to get some shot the iaf continues to impress me it continues to lock on and the shots when i check them are just super sharp i really cannot emphasize how sharp the shots are when using auto iaf when it works it really is a game changer so if you like this video give me a thumbs up you know subscribe if you want to see more of these videos leave comments below because i always love reading the comments and other people like reading comments thanks again to the members who support the channel directly i appreciate it until the next video take care bye for now and see you later okay so what i'm going to do is all right so all right in today's video i'm going to start in today's video all right where was i oh that was an amazing session i just

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 30,747

Keywords: bird photography tips, bird photography lenses canon, bird photography canon, canon 5d mark iv, cameras for bird photography, bird photographer, best canon lens for bird photography, best lens for wildlife photography, Telephoto Lens for bird photography, wildlife photography in the field, field testing telephoto lenses, Lens Review, Canon R6 Review, Canon Autofocus Issues, Canon 500 f4 lens, canon r6 autofocus, Canon R5 Review, Canon R6 Image Quality

Id: zCDiiOidtAo

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021