Garden Bird Photography

do you enjoy photographing the birds in your garden it's a fun thing to do especially during the current travel restrictions imposed by covid although the images i'm showing on screen now are reasonable in themselves they're cluttered with the bird feeder and they don't look as natural as they could they can be improved upon with just a little modification and organization of your photographic setup by a few simple changes it's possible to get photos like these on screen now which in my opinion at least are much better for example there is no evidence of the bird feeders in the photographs and there is a nice diffuse background in addition the bird is on an attractive perch all these factors combine to give an overall more pleasing result so if you want to take shots like this keep watching and i will teach you my method hello and welcome back to the channel today i want to talk to you about how i photograph wild birds in my garden what you see behind me is my bird feeder setup that i have and i run that through most of the winter feeding the birds that come into the garden and i got various different feeders containing sunflower seeds and also half coconut shells which are full of fat and you can buy these online they're relatively cheap and you could they'll last you quite some time what i tend to do is dismantle all of this and set up a perch which is much more natural looking than if you were photographing birds actually on the feeders themselves i'll show you some photographs i talked earlier on today with birds on the feeders but the plan now is to remove all of these and introduce a more natural looking perch for the birds to perch on and giving a more pleasing result so in order for me to do that i'll need to remove these and then i'm going to set up my portable high now you don't need a portable hide as you hopefully can make out the birds are actually coming to feed on these feeders even while i'm standing next to them but i'll do that anyway i'll put my my uh portable garden hide up just to give a little bit of sort of camouflage if you like from the camera point of view so this is the view from the hide showing the feeder with the coconut half half coconut shell upside down with some sunflower seeds at the bottom of that pot and then the perch that i want the birds to be landing on which is here and there's probably about four inches three inches difference in height so basically i'm going to get the perch the branch here with all the lovely lichen on it but in my field of view i will not have the feeder at all so the idea is that the birds will come and perch on the branch on the twig here before going into the feeder and then the important thing is composition is everything so the important thing to avoid is if you see it in the back left hand corner on the top left hand corner i've got my garden shed and i certainly don't want that as part of the the image so always look around the frame before you press the button uh the shutter button to make sure that you're not going any got anything that you wouldn't want in the frame in the frame okay so here's a closer view of the feeding situation this is the small feeding tray that i've got filled with some sunflower and then the upturned coconut with fat in it here's the perch that i'm hoping the birds will land on which is uh rather attractive it's it's not just a plain per a perch i managed to search around in the woodland behind my house and found that one with nice bits of lichen on it which i'm hopeful that the birds will land on waiting their turn to get at the feeder so preparation is quite important in this and as i'm shooting from the off to the right in this direction i'm not getting any of the feed or the coconut or the seed in view everything will be above that above my hand so i'm getting the perch and the birds on the perch so all i need to do now is to remove all the other feeders that i don't want in shot to concentrate the bird activity where i want it well i'm nearly ready to go but i thought i'd show you the equipment i'm going to use today so i've got a sony a9 uh camera body 24 megapixels at 20 frames a second to mirrorless camera and i can have completely silent shooting at 20 frames per second which is a real bonus for wildlife photography i've got that connected to a sony 200 to 600 millimeter lens it's mounted on a benro gimbal and this is a brilliant gimbal which allows me effectively to move the camera in any direction by just using one finger and it will just stay put where i leave it then and that's a really good help for when you're doing any wildlife photography i probably use a tripod and a gimbal like this for about 90 percent of my long lens work and that's connected to the gib gitzo tripod that i normally use carbon fiber tripod so that's the camera i'll be using the perch itself is just basically connected to in this case an old tripod and i've just just used a couple of cable ties garden cable ties to tie the perch the twig onto the tripod leg or the the the arm of the tripod it's similar to a benro tripod this particular one but any object will do that you can anchor the perch too and then it's just a question of aligning it just above the the feed tray so four or five inches above in this case now what i'm hoping for is i'll move these feeders away in a moment so i'll just have this one left in the area for the birds to use and the idea of the birds will come in land on the perch while they're waiting their turn to get into the feeding tray it's always always always important to look at your background when you're photographing any wildlife you do not want anything intrusive in the background and i don't know if you can make out but in the background here i've got a bit of blue plastic through the hedge of my garden which is over some wood that's drying i certainly don't want that blue in the image so composition is absolutely important and one of the most important aspects in fact of wildlife photography so always bear in mind what you've got in the background before you start pressing the shutter button on the camera so that's about it so we'll get into the hide now remove all these feeders get into the hide and get on with our photography well i'm now sitting in my hide and you can see the bird activity here it's just started raining and that's another virtue of being able to use a hide you don't actually have to suffer the rain yourself so you can see how frenetic the action is here i'll just move the camera a little bit so you can see the perch that i'm using sometimes they'll land on it and others they won't depends i mean there's one just landed on now two awaiting their turn for the feeder so that's what it's all about i'll zoom out a little so you got more of a an idea and by zooming out you can see where i've got a bit of blue plastic in my garden covering up some wood that's drying and you can see now from the composition point of view it's not such a good image because that blue is creeping in and these are the sort of things that you need to be aware of when you're taking your shots because the last thing you want to do is to come to the end of a shooting session and find that you've got objects in the frame that you don't really want a great spotted woodpecker calling somewhere nearby now be nice if that came and landed on the perch whilst concentrating on taking still images of the birds in your garden why not also have a go at some video photography particularly using slow motion it really does reveal interesting aspects of bird behavior for example here the robin picking up a piece of sunflower seed then hopping back to the perch turning around and looking for some more whilst all the time the rain is pouring onto its back and you can see the raindrops bouncing up from the feathers every now and again it really does add more to your portfolio okay so now i'm back indoors at my computer looking at the images that i've taken in the garden and i use a program called photo mechanic for quickly running through the photographs that i've taken and i can easily see the ones that i can keep and the ones that i can delete so what you see here is a cold version uh i'm gonna probably end up deleting a few of these and i thought what i'd do is show you a processing uh the way i process my images uh i should say so well let's try this one here for example that uh the file number is zero four eight six so if i now go to photoshop and look for that file zero four eight six and that's the one there so i can open the image now in photoshop and this is where i start processing it the first thing i tend to do is remove any chromatic aberration and apply any profile corrections you'll notice it's recognized that i was using a sony uh camera with a 200 600 ml ends and if i move up a little bit the overall feeling of this image is it's a little bit on the cool side so it's got a temperature at the moment of 3700 so i'm going to warm it up a little bit you'll notice that there's a lovely diffuse background now this image was shot at 4000 iso at aperture of f9 and 640 of 640 of a second using manual manual exposure in the camera so at this point i've done all i need to do there i'm gonna just click open i don't think i need to use any highlight slider but we'll bring that down a touch here just just lower it a little bit just it does help there's no obvious shadows to deal with here so i'm going to open this image now and put it into photoshop um so there are various different ways you can um carry on from here i think that's probably enough at the moment the next step to do for me on this image is to get rid of some of this noise if i uh zoom into 200 you can see the noise the digital noise around here so uh if i move the bird around you can see quite clearly evidence of digital noise in the background now recently over the last year or so i've invested in a program called topaz by the way i'm just going to change this these pixel sizes to six thousand by four thousand uh but anyway i've used a program called topaz d-noise ai which does a fantastic job of getting rid of this noise without really affecting the quality of the bird uh that i'm concentrating on so the way i find that is to come down to topaz labs topaz denoise a i so this is all being done in real time just to give you an idea about how long this process lasts now at the moment it's generating a preview once it's done that i'll bring the uh like the space for showing the bird's head high and you can see the difference between the two here this is oops i've just tapped that inadvertently so on the left hand side of this line is the unprocessed image as far as topaz is concerned and to the right is the processed version and you can see instantly i hope the difference between the two so now this is set on auto all i need to do now is press apply and it takes uh probably a minute 60 80 seconds something like that to go through probably a bit less actually on this image to get rid of the digital noise and you know the this is a fairly time consuming process but believe me the results are worth it and the other thing to say is that if you have several images which have very been taken under similar conditions similar iso similar light conditions then there is a batch processing ability with denoise ai which does uh you know so while that's going on 10 or 15 images perhaps you've got time to go make yourself a cup of tea or whatever so we're two thirds of the way through the moment this is a 24 megapixel image remember so it does take some time i've got a reasonably uh fast computer so you may find it a little bit slower if you've got a slower computer or a bit faster if you've got a faster one so we're coming up to 100 now [Music] there we go and hopefully you can see the improvement there so i'm just going to bring that to fit on screen now what i'm going to do i'm just going to crop that a little bit just to give us a bit of an idea so obviously this is the blue tit on the feeder um yeah i mean the bluetooth shown reasonably well i like the background i've got a bit of a smudge here i think that must be a dust spot on my my sensor so i'm just going to delete that the other thing is a little bit of white here which catches the eye i'm going to zoom in a little bit just to you know this is really being very very picky but you can see that um white spot at the end of the bird's beak there which is a bit of seed so i'm just going to get rid of that with a cloak whoops that didn't work as intended i might need to just zoom in zoom in a little bit more just to get rid of that and there's several different ways of doing that so here i'm just going to use edit fill and content aware see if that makes that does make a better job so if i go back now to fit on screen the bird's beak looks a little bit better and so there we are now this is saved at six part six thousand by four thousand now depending on what your use for this is you might want to put a border on it if you're going to send it to the web you'd certainly want to have it a lot smaller than it is so whoops uh that's clever isn't it so let me get rid of that i didn't want the lasso so that's one of the images i took with the bird atta feeder no reasonable uh you know it's reasonable sort of image you know you might might be well pleased with that but for me i think we can make a better better result of that by using the perch so i'm gonna get out of this image now and what i'll do i will save that image mode i'll save it to my desktop there we go so that's saved and now i'll close out of there and go on to back to photo mechanic to find an image of the birds on the perch okay so so much for that image so what i'd like to do now is process another one but this time with the birds on the perch that we were set up for them so here we go this is image number zero double four five so if i now go to photoshop i can open that image zero zero four five five four four five here we go and there's a great amount of interaction between these two birds and obviously birds at a feeder station in the winter there's a lot of rivalry for food so the processing will be very similar to the last one so first things first i've removed the chromatic aberration and applied the profile correction to the image for the camera and lens i was using as per the previous image so now i'm going to slide up and just adjust the exposure it's important not to blow the whites of the cheeks of these birds out when you're photographing so this one's a little bit underexposed so it just needs a little bit of help bringing that out and also reducing the blacks and the shadows um i'm just going to tone the bring the temperature down a little bit and lighten that a little bit more i like the the action between these two birds and the fact that this bird is also looking at the camera what you have here is a piece of the lichen that's been displaced by the bird that's a dangly bit of like and i'm not too happy with so we can correct that in a moment so um just point out this one was taken at an iso of 400 a lot less than the 4 000 on the previous shot it's got a an aperture of f9 and 640 of a second as for as per the previous shot the sun was clearly a lot brighter at this point in the day when i took this photograph so now i'm going to open the image and because it was using a much lower iso i'm not going to apply any topaz de noise here because you know you really need to zoom in 200 to to be bothered by any noise on this image what i will do though i'll zoom in at a hundred percent just to tidy the image up so i'll use my lasso tool here just to go around there i'll go to edit fill content aware fill click ok and that should make a good job of that and here i'm just going to use the healing brush to get rid of some of these minor aberrations if you like and again the lasso to outline this several different ways you can do this so edit fill content aware fill again hopefully that will do a good job yeah so i'm quite happy with that so let's view that full screen size again so yeah what i'm going to do is having said i'm not going to apply topaz i will in in this case actually so i'm going to filter topaz labs not so much for the noise but for a little bit of sharpening that this program will deliver so if i now click apply as i say it's on auto as it was in the previous image i know there shouldn't be too much noise but there will be a little bit of sharpening applied and that's i think is going to help this image overall just got to wait for it to churn through the process so i'm going to stop here and i'll come back when the process has been completed okay so here we are um this has got rid of the noise and it's given us a little bit more sharpening on both of the birds so now the only thing i want to do here is again just crop it a little bit one of the things you can do here with this image because the edge of the branch is a reasonable distance away from this bird is to bring in the crop so that you can actually give the impression that the branch goes right across the frame so if i do that and we've got that as an image now i'll move that out the way and you'll notice hopefully how attractive this branch is they're so easy to find in in the wild when you're just wandering around the countryside and it just enhances things enormously rather than seeing a bird like a blue tit on a bird feeder i like the background in in this as well it's another soft background there's plenty of space around the bird both top and bottom left and right and there's nothing distracting in the background to distract us our eyes away from the birds [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] right um it's worth pointing out that you should try and keep these sessions short in the winter time particularly because obviously birds are habituated to coming to the feed and so i tend to be doing this for no longer than say an hour at a time and at that point i will put all the feeders back so the birds are able to carry on feeding as per normal well that brings me to the end of this presentation and i hope it's been useful for you to watch and you've learned something um i'd be very happy to see any of your comments on the channel and not be able to respond to them as and when they appear also you can contact me via my website the address for that is wildlife on the web dot co dot uk well that's it for now and i look forward to seeing you in my next presentation bye

Channel: Wildlife photography tips and advice

Views: 6,021

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Id: lQpnMeQPD9E

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021