Episode Seven: Garden bird photography – setting up perches

hello well today we're photographing garden birds using a very simple technique a really good trick that works incredibly well not to get artificial pictures like this or this but to get wilder much more natural looking shots more like this and this [Music] now we're going to photograph the birds on perches and by perch i don't necessarily mean just a regular branch or twig although that can be very effective too it could be anything from a rotting old piece of log or a lichen covered rock or a beautiful piece of moss anywhere that's photogenic the birds might land so how do you do it well first of all of course you've got to attract birds to the garden i'm sure you're all doing that anyway by providing feeders and then you need to provide a perch now you get rid of all the natural perches and we'll go into this in a minute in order to provide a particular perch for the bursa landlord now very often garden birds will prefer to land somewhere before they make that final leap of faith or drop down to the feeder so that's the key point the perch that you provide and the great thing about photography in the garden is that you can put it anywhere you like so you can control the background and the foreground the angle of the light the angle of the shooting so there's actually no excuse not to get everything exactly right there are other advantages to photographing garden birds too they're readily accessible you can even capture frame filling images of them from your kitchen window then they tend to be tamer and more relaxed around people than most wild birds out in the countryside and of course they're amazingly adaptable you can move the feeders around change the perches add a new prop whatever you want to do and they'll often return literally within a few minutes so first of all you pick a corner of the garden the most photogenic corner of the garden that's going to be your outdoor studio and that's where you're going to provide the food doesn't matter whether it's sunflower hearts or peanuts whatever you like to feed the birds and that will bring in all your photographic subjects now the options for feeding stations of course depend on the size of your garden but it doesn't have to be a wild jungle any space whether it's a rambling estate or a busy suburban family garden can be bird friendly if you've got a small garden there's no problem in putting the feeder very close to the house right by a window ideally the birds won't bother at all and it means you can photograph from inside the house through the open kitchen window or the lounge window or wherever it happens to be of course you can have a coffee in one hand or a beer and camera in the other is perfect and the really great thing is you can shoot from literally anywhere i mean not just the kitchen window you could sit in a chair in the garden and very quickly the birds will probably get used to you could put up a temporary hide photograph from the garden shed i often hide in the back here in this woodshed just sit in a chair in the shadows and the feeder is just the other side of the camera and it works really really well there's no harm at all of course in doing a little feeder photography it's all good practice so by all means take some pictures of birds on the sunflower hearts these were taken with a remote camera and a wide angle lens by the way which is another fantastic and really simple technique we'll be talking about another time and here's a simple shot of a great spotted woodpecker on the peanut feeder with a telephoto lens this one from the kitchen window so experiment with composition and focusing and try to shoot in the best light you know think about the direction of the light at different times of day and with the least distracting backgrounds it's all going to be incredibly useful when you're ready to do the real thing as a little aside i'd just like to mention a big problem that i had at the beginning when i first started doing this in case you have the same problem and that's the challenge of squirrels jackdaws crows rooks and magpies because they would destroy my feeders and they'd completely ruin all the photographic sets that i made if i put a lovely delicate little perch up they'd break off the perch often within minutes and it was getting really really disheartening over the years i've tried and tested all sorts of different seed and nut feeders for garden birds but not very many really work they're fine for the small birds but they're hopeless for keeping the marauders away i even tried making my own so what do you think about this this is my homemade contraption supposedly squirrel proof it's a feeding pole and i grease the pole with sunflower oil to make it really slippery i've got these really sharp spiky security spikes i don't what you call them attached all the way around there there's a cone that's supposed to be squirrel proof they're not supposed to get past that more spikes and the feeder was up on the top there didn't make any difference at all the squirrels got up there somehow what i then did was i put hot chili powder in with the peanuts just a little bit sprinkled it in shook it all up and that doesn't bother the birds at all doesn't harm them in any way but it's supposed to put the squirrels off didn't worry one bit the first girl up there started eating the peanuts he pulled a face like this is really hot but carried on eating like it was the best vindaloo in the world but i have now hit upon the perfect solution and this is it now it does tick three very important boxes the birds love it the squirrels and jackdaws and cow hate it and it's the perfect setup for photography all the details are on my website so you can look there for where to get it from and what's involved but best of all and from a photographic point of view this is critical the feeder screws into the top of a pole and of course what that means is you don't have to hang the feeder from anywhere at all now as you know most bird feeders have artificial arms and they give the birds too many places to perch before they take that leap of faith to the feeder so when you're ready to take some photographs all you do is you remove that cage from the feeder just temporarily while you're shooting you close up every potential landing site leaving just one and that's the one the birds are going to go to and it's fine just for an hour hour and a half you've got your branch which we'll talk about in a moment over here and the birds are going to queue on the branch and then fly across to the landing site on the feeder and there are no other places for the birds to perch you might might take this away as well just to be sure and they might typically perch on there but there's nothing else no artificial arms no natural perches just your perch here and where they're heading for here okay so let's talk about the perches now the perch can make or break your photograph and the thing is the birds will land on pretty much anything you put out for them if you've got the basics set up right they will perch on the perch you give them so take great care and pick a perch that really adds to the photograph here's what to look for in the perfect perch character anything but boring straight and featureless otherwise the picture looks like a contrived bird on a stick look for color too old and weathered bends and twists are all good now it also has to be an appropriate size the diameter of the perch should be appropriate for the size of the bird you're hoping to photograph it mustn't be too thick or chunky or it'll overpower your subject making it look awkward and out of proportion it's important to get the appropriate habitat remember to use perches that are natural to the preferred habitat of the birds you're photographing try and use something local and native medium tones are good a medium tone perch in other words one that's neither very dark or very light is ideal as a general rule though too dark is better than too bright otherwise it can dominate the picture and create havoc with your exposure control think about simplicity there should be nothing too distracting on the perch to take the viewer's eye away from the bird and the fussier the perch the harder it is to compose and the more difficult it is to get the birds to perch exactly where you want them now also the perch mustn't be too long a long perch blows about in the wind making it really difficult to focus and keep the birds sharp and of course it offers too many potential landing sites along its length and finally no clipped ends the branch will inevitably be broken by you or the wind or something else and it won't look natural if the cut is too obvious so try to keep the broken end out of sight or break it in such a way that it's not really visible now the fun begins we set up the perch so i set it up about the same height as the feeder slightly behind the feeder so the birds are looking this way sort of towards the camera if you put it too much in front of the feeder they'll have their back to the camera most of the time have it about the same height and then the other thing to remember is have it parallel to the plane of the camera so if you don't do that and you have it at an angle then the bird might be sharp but the rest of the branch will be all out of focus and it'll all look really odd so parallel to the camera about this height slightly behind the feeder and it's going to work perfectly now to begin with especially if you have problems with squirrels and coat it's a really good idea to set up a temporary perch like this one here this is exactly where i want the proper perch to go so the birds get used to it and then when the time comes i can just replace it with the perfect perch and that doesn't get ruined by squirrels and jackdaws and crows or little feet or bird poo or weather or anything else and it looks good for the photograph and the really great thing is you can keep changing the perch to get different shots and the birds will usually accept your offerings within a matter of minutes the devil is in the detail of course an otherwise wonderful photograph with an engaging subject beautiful blurry background and gorgeous light and everything else can be ruined by just one apparently insignificant glitch and the commonest problem is when artificial bird food is visible this bull french is another good example it's so obviously eating sunflower hearts and you can even see them down there in the bottom right hand corner the other problem is when the bird isn't the most attractive representative of its species now i know this blue tick can't help being unphotogenic but well it is and here's a robin that ticks both what to avoid boxes the robin itself is a bit of a state it's not the perfect christmas card robin and it has an artificially fed mealworm in its mouth the great thing about this technique is once you've perfected the art of getting the birds to land on a particular perch you can get them to land pretty much anywhere on any natural or unnatural object you've just got to put food in the right place position the object where you want to photograph them and they'll do their thing it's just making the most of their natural behavior their willingness to perch pretty much anywhere so here are a couple of examples of what i mean this is a bluetooth on a watering can i just put a bowl of food on the ground just out of sight out of the picture to the left and waited and sure enough the bluetick came and perched on the watering can now here i put a little bowl of mealworms immediately below a fork handle and within minutes one of the local robins obliged it's a bit of a cliche but it's quite nice to be able to do this kind of thing and here's a weird one i hung a kind of appropriate sock on a piece of washing line between two feeders and yep sure enough a blue tick couldn't resist perching on the line and i got the shot well i hope that was useful and it'll inspire you to have a go at photographing garden birds if you're not doing that already it's really good fun i've put together a few of my favorite pictures from the last few weeks using this very technique so i hope you enjoy those and i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Wildlife Magazine

Views: 11,338

Rating: 4.9610138 out of 5

Keywords: BBC Wildlife Photography masterclass, wildlife photography, garden birds

Id: 7NlQksGR8Vw

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021