Photographing Kingfishers the easy way

hi today we're going to look at photographing kingfishers now i've done a youtube clip on kingfishers before but perhaps what i did was a bit complicated a bit involved for some people it was part of an ongoing project where i was working on kingfishers for some weeks today the emphasis is on how easy it is to photograph a kingfisher just in one session one morning if you've got kingfishers on the land you stand a very good chance of being able to photograph them the first thing you need to know though is whether you've got a kingfisher if you've got a lake and you walk around it on a regular basis and that lake has an open aspect you can see it you might from time to time see a kingfisher but just because you see it once doesn't mean that kingfisher is a regular bird there it might turn up at that lake if it doesn't catch a fish why is it going to go back it won't well it will but maybe in a week's time or a month's time we'll go and check it out again but they won't become regular unless they're catching fish so if you've got a lake where you've got a good view and you can see a kingfisher there on a regular basis then you can start thinking about photographing it on a river it's more difficult you can walk along the wooded river and never know that the kingfisher was there although it's a very colorful bird when they land in the bushes they're so well camouflaged you just wouldn't see it and it's a much smaller bird than we usually think of it as well it's only about so high and when they fly it's a very fast very direct flight so it goes past you in the blink of an eye and it's very easy to miss it more often than not with kingfishers you hear them before you see them they've got this high-pitched whistle and the only bird you can confuse it with is a donnock dunk is not quite as high pitched and when i hear one or the other call i usually say to myself that's a donald call that's a kingfisher and i'm right nine times out of ten occasionally i call it wrong but as you get older your hearing gets worse your eyesight gets worse but if you do hear that high pitch whistle you just pay attention because one's likely to go darting past you but on a river if you want to know if you've got a kingfisher all you've got to do is get your camping stall out and sit on a vantage point like this where you're looking along the length of the river it can be upstream or downstream but you want a long view ideally a hundred meters this is not quite 100 meters but it will do but if i sit here for one to two hours and there's a resident kingfisher on this river there's an excellent chance it's going to go past me now you've got to pay attention because i say it's a very fast flyer so it's no good checking your emails on your mobile phone or seeing how much money you've made today in advertising on youtube you've got to keep looking now i already know that skinfish is on this river and i know where i'm going to photograph them too it's about 200 meters downstream from here it's the perfect patch it's the same patch as i did the previous youtube uh clip on because it's it's ideal it's perfect for the job but i haven't actually been there for some weeks now but later on i'm going to go down there and just show you how easy it is to photograph kingfishers so this is the spot that i'm going to photograph for kingfisher it is the same place that i did the other youtube video on because it's just absolutely perfect it's the only open stretch of river here there's no trees so when the sun comes up in that direction the the light pulls into here and there's no overhanging branches there's nowhere else the kingfisher can land so if i provide a perch for the kingfisher just here it will be like a magnet the kingfisher will not be able to resist it you'll see him her fly up this stream and go 10 meters past the perch because he's flying very fast and i miss it but go on 10 meters i do a u-turn he will come back to that perch the very important thing is you don't put the perch up the day before the perch goes up when you want to take the photographs once the kingfisher has landed on it if he doesn't catch a fish he's not going to be so keen to come back to it but when it's a brand new perch never been there before it's irresistible they will come and land on it nine times out of ten so you notice i've used tape to tie the cross member onto the two posts i could have used nails i could have used string it doesn't really matter and it certainly doesn't have to be camouflaged now there is a problem with this perch i haven't got it quite right yet i've got to twist it around in in that the kingfisher won't necessarily land in the middle in fact there's a very good chance of the kingfisher landing at the very ends of it where the camouflage tape is and that's not just me being pessimistic that is just the case statistically they won't land in the middle as often as they land on the end and i don't know why that is a bit of an analogy would be when we jump off a diving board we don't jump off in the middle we go to the end and jump off it's not very good analogy anyway from experience i know kingfishers are likely to go to the end where the camouflage tape is and i won't be able to get pictures but i can put up with that he will land here sometimes the way to solve that is not to use this sort of perch this is very heavy i have to support it at both ends if i used something like this i could just support it at that end i could attach this and just leave this loose so there's no support for it and the bird would land on here you stand more chance of getting the picture that way but i want to do him on here i've just got to twist this around a little bit it's at the wrong angle [Applause] now you might think the next thing to do is to set the height up but it isn't the next thing to do is to set your camera up you're not constrained by the hide you can move your camera about if you don't quite like the background we can move to the right move to the left we can get the image size right as well i'm using the 100 to 400 panasonic leica zoom lens so i've got some flexibility there but remember that a kingfisher is very small only so high so you've got to be quite close to it and kingfishers are not bothered by hides i mentioned the fact he might land on the end of my branch rather than the middle of it the other thing he might do is land on the hide itself they're not bothered by highs they're not nervous birds they're quite confident that's happened to me many times so i'm gonna get this at the right height where i'm happy with the background happy with my image size and make sure that i'm comfortable on my stall as well which actually i'm not if i'd have thought this through if i'd have done this yesterday in preparation i'd have bought a spade and i'd dug the bank out a little bit because as it is we're on quite a steep slope here and i'm uncomfortable sitting on this this stall but anyway i'll just have to put up with it i'm gonna do a three to four hour stint in here so i i can cope okay i'm happy with my background now we're going to put the hide up over the camera equipment now i like to use pop-up hides they're very popular pop-up hides but when you work on a sloping bank it's a bit awkward so i'm going to use today the standard british type hide with four telescopic poles so i can adjust the height of each pole and level it out unfortunately you can't buy british hides anymore i've had a couple of goes at selling them i had about 50 made up all told but i really struggled to sell them people prefer pop-up highs today and i do but there's circumstances like this where the telescopic poles make it a lot more comfortable [Music] so and that's it we're ready to get in as well as being better on a slope they're a lot more stable in strong winds as well put the guy ropes on here and it will stay up in a gale and not many pop-up highs will will do that but i say unfortunately you'd have to build one yourself today and getting hold of the aluminium poles is usually the most difficult part so that's it we're in the hide you put a little bit of scrimming here drape it off the top bar of the hide and we can adjust the aperture and block it up as much as we like it's velcroed and that we just have to sit here and wait well i had to wait a long time about three minutes and a male kingfisher arrived he's landed to the right i've got to very slowly move the camera note i'm not looking through the viewfinder at this point i'm looking out of the screaming at the bird while slowly pushing the camera to the right i want to be able to see if the bird is looking nervous whether he's staring at the hide which is not so we're shooting a slow motion here this is the panasonic g9 camera 180 frames per second i love doing wildlife in slow motion doesn't mean you have to manually focus so i have peaking set which turns the area that's in sharp focus into red pixels makes it a bit easier this is very typical of a kingfisher it's got its back to me because the light is in my direction and if you want to look into water you look down the light not into the light so you do have to wait a long time sometimes for a kingfisher to turn and pose for you but i took a number of pictures stills pictures and video and he's not flying away here he's just moved up to where i said he would where the tape is and now we're looking at normal speed it's a male kingfisher because it's got an all black bill and this was a bit frustrating i've got the animal tracking on with the g9 and i do enjoy using the animal tracking it does work this is for the auto focus but when it's jumped onto the background there because there was no bird in the picture i guess it now doesn't recognize that kingfisher as an animal so it doesn't attempt to autofocus on it again flew off flew straight back still one water focus on it some bad language coming from the hide at this point now i can get around it i've now got to touch the screen where i want it to focus and then i've got to change the dial to make it a smaller yellow box and eventually it did autofocus but if i'd been using my olympus micro four third which is my main camera system that wouldn't have happened i like the g9 for the video and for the 180 frames per second in particular but uh oh now he's gone to the other end so there's always this thing with kingfishers about being on the end he did catch a fish only one that's uh at a point where again the auto focus just wouldn't lock on to it so now let's look at a few stills pictures i'll talk about what you're looking for in a stills picture as well starting off with the image size typically a bird is one third of the size of the frame which is about what we're looking at here notice also that the bird has got more space in front of it than behind this is again just standard composition the bird's head is not in the right position however his head is turned slightly away from me so i'm waiting for him to turn his head towards me slightly now he's turned his head towards me but you can see the eyes got the third eyelid over it so that's not perfect either which is why you'd normally be shooting at the maximum frames per second so when he does turn his head you hit the button you're in silent mode electronic shutter so the camera makes no noise and you just take as many pictures as you can because if in the very best pose if he's blinking his eye like that you're spawning the picture so you want as many frames as possible so that's a better pose and his tails cocked up a little bit too the important part to get sharp is the eye so i quite often just have one focusing point which i place onto the eye if the tip of the tail is not sharp nobody will notice but the eye has to be razor sharp the shutter speed you're using is almost irrelevant i'm on a very heavy tripod i could be shooting at a thirtieth of a second five hundredths of a second two thousandths it would make little difference to the picture the aperture or depth of field that makes a bigger difference kingfishers are quite chunky birds so you need a fair amount of depth of field to get them sharp throughout especially when the bird is facing towards you or away from you when it's sideways on you don't need quite so much depth of field so i'd be shooting at perhaps f11 something like that on average to try and give myself enough depth of field to cover the entire bird front to back so i was very lucky today that the bird came in as quickly as it did that doesn't always happen but when it does come along the river and it sees a new perch there is an excellent chance it will go towards it so if you want to do this bird again if you've had some success but perhaps next weekend you're going to try it again take the perch away don't leave it out and then when you come back and you put your hide up put the perch there and there's a very good chance a bird will come into you next weekend too thanks for watching

Channel: Mike Lane FRPS

Views: 113,076

Rating: 4.9615273 out of 5

Keywords: bird, nature, wildlife, animal, photography, kingfisher

Id: Q1ckd5c5VZU

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020