SIX FUNDAMENTAL steps to take HIGH QUALITY bird photographs.

get everyone welcome to the channel and today's video I'm gonna share with you the six steps that I use every time I photograph Birds if you follow these six steps it'll cover all the fundamentals of bird photography and it'll definitely help you capture those nice beautiful images it's important I preface this video by saying what I think is a great image it's just my opinion the important part about food photography and photography is in general it's just the fact of being out there enjoying yourself and taking the photos it's way more important than the opinion of some old bald dude on YouTube but in saying that what do I mean by great well what do I mean by amazing how do you measure these things as if social media likes theirs at winning competitions is it the opinion of other photographers image sales or is it what you think about the image or what you like doesn't even matter if the image is good well it depends why you take photos you know some people are happy just to get out there with the birds and take the photos and that's fine for others it's about getting as much social media attention as they can and for others it's the journey of self-improvement I've written down what I think is a great image and I'll share that with you now so a truly great image is technically sound engaging unique and tells a story which creates an emotional response I think that's really important you know when you look at an image you instantly know whether it's good or not just by how long you look at it the feeling you get you know do you smile do you stare we're going after all these thing these all contribute I think to making a great image and hopefully by following these steps you'll capture those okay so step number one it's the location you know you have to know where the birds are and you have to go wherever you can photograph these birds so the location is key I don't just turn up to a location hoping to capture good images I plan and I do a lot of research and often I'll visit these locations before I even take a camera it's really important to know where the lights coming from the birds time where are the birds what sort of birds can you expect these are all very important things before you get up early and head out there for example there's a lot of ducks in Australia some ducks at Ames some a wild I'd really wanted a great image of a chestnut teal beautiful duck fairly common its some locations you go to their brick walls lots of people stuff in the way you can't get low and just makes it difficult to get those great images but I did find one location and in suburbia it was a lake and I visited it and I thought fantastic these birds I can get close to them I can get low but I knew it was just in the afternoon so I waited for nice afternoon light with no wind I went down there and had a great session with these ducks and captured this image I hadn't done that groundwork or had a look I probably wouldn't even have to get it so how do you find out about these locations well you can ask other people who look online see with other people of photographed birds maybe send them a message B birds a good spot figure out with birds are but ultimately you just have to do the groundwork yourself so step number two it's the light as with any photography light is so important it can really change the feel of an image it can often be the difference between a good image in a greater mention so how does light apply to bird photography well generally you'll have three types of light that you'll shoot with is you've got early morning light you've got late afternoon light and then overcast those are probably the three most common types of light that you'll use I predominantly use natural light so photographer once said to me when I started out photographed for the first two hours after the Sun comes up in the last two hours before the Sun Goes Down if you photographed between those times you'll be guaranteed to get some nice shots and I pretty much implemented that my whole time of photographing Birds the other one I got told was check the length of your shadow if your shadow is longer than your height then it's nice light so maybe try that next time you're out and about so I can give you an example with Birds some birds actually prefer certain types of life so you'll get say waterfowl ducks and whatnot they'd look terrible and overcast condition they look dreary and flat like this Australian grebe on the screen at the moment it's actually a pretty terrible image but I believe I took this this was the first image I've taken of the species so I just took the image however in subsequent years I had the opportunity to photograph the same species and beautiful morning light and this is the image I got and you can see how much better it is it's got beautiful color in the background the water's taken on the color it's warm there's great detail it's overall a much better image the poses are very similar that the light makes all the difference so you often hear people talking about avoid harsh light what do they mean by harsh light harsh light just means generally when the sun's high in the sky it casts really heavy shadows on whatever you're photographing so with birds you get these very heavy shadows on the chest and behind the bird on the perch the rock whatever it is and it comes quite unpleased and it's also very bright and harsh as in the light it just don't look very nice it's probably easiest I explained this with an example here's a eastern bristle bird which is a fairly endangered bird on the east coast of Australia even though the the light was harsh we wanted to photograph this bird so we took some shots because it is quite rare however as you can see it's not the best image that the light just lets it down with all those shadows and the rock looks bright so it wasn't very good so what we decided to do is we made a decision to come back early the next morning and the best light we went back to the spot and we took this image which is much better you can see how warm it is the detail is good it just feels better and the interesting thing is same camera same lens same photographer the only difference is the light so if you don't wanna get out of bed early that that's what you're missing out on you really have to make the most of that morning and afternoon light so what can you photograph an overcast light well Bush Birds are great to photograph when you've got cloud cover because those clouds act as a big diffuser and they remove all the shadows from the bird and the background and you can use a little bit of fill flash if needed just to bring out the details in the bird but often those overcast conditions are great for Bush Birds and I do enjoy that and I've got a good mate that just loves the clouds prefers the clouds over the Sun so that can make a big difference that brings us to step number three and that's really laying our foundations what do I mean there that I'm talking about the exposure the image quality and the sharpness of the image if you don't have these fundamentals it doesn't really matter what sort of behavior you catch or the type of images it'll always be let down you have to have those technical foundations sorted so then you don't have to worry about it and you can go and capture those great images so with bird photography and exposure all we're really trying to do is not blow those whites or that's all I'm trying to do so I'm always exposing to the right I'm pushing that histogram as far to the right without clipping the whites so I'm always checking when I take photos before I take them I take test shots and figure out what my exposure is before I take it and you obviously don't it too dark or too bright and you just want that exposure just right a good exposure will remove noise will improve your image quality it makes it quite a big difference so it's important that you do figure out your exposure settings before you go out in the field so once you've got your exposure sorted you want to get your sharpness under control and how do you get sharp bird photos there's a few ways to do it the first one is just shutter speed so generally the rule of thumb is whatever your focal length is you want a shutter speed higher than your focal length so if you're shooting 400 millimetres you want four hundredth of a second or higher it's not a hard rule the higher the shutter speed the less likely you are to get soft images using a tripod if you've got a heavy camera can definitely assist you is on the lens and the other thing that I often do is I take lots of photos so if you if you take a burst of photos and you're continually focusing hopefully you know the majority of them will be in focus but you increase your odds the more images you take that one of them will be sharp so your aperture can also influence how sharp something is so we're talking about depth of field generally with birds it's around f/8 that's what our target is so that brings us to image quality how do you get good image quality well unfortunately you do have to have appropriate gear I did shoot a video recently showing that even with budget gear you can get great shot so maybe you want to check that out the link above at the end of the day you want focal lengths so you want lens that is probably minimum 400 millimetres focal length that's basically a zoom so it allows you to get you don't have to get too close to the birds it's like a magnifier in effect so if you only have a focal length of a hundred mil you're gonna have to get really close to that bird and often birds will fly away and you won't get those smooth backgrounds so the more focal length you have the better and you really want to invest in a good quality lens so I did a review on the Canon EF 400 5.6 that's probably one of the most affordable great birding lenses that are available so maybe check that out also and then the camera of course definitely helps but I would I would highly suggest investing in a good lens most cameras these days will work fine regard which camera you need to use or which system you use let's have a look at an example of a really bad image and a good image this was at the very start of my bird photography journey and it's a very poor image so I was just walking around in the bush taking photos of birds and trees and this is a eastern yellow robin that I took is it sharp no is it well exposed no it's too dark does it have good image quality definitely not you can hardly make out the bird and it's overall a really poor image it didn't take long before I realized the images I were taking we're not very good still a lot of research and ultimately came up with these steps that I'm talking about in today's video and then seven months I went from that image to this image and as you can see it's light and day the difference between their two images I've got the exposure sorted it's sharp and it has great image quality mainly thanks to the four hundred five point six that I invested in so as you can see a big difference between the two images and them relatively short space of time by just following some basic steps and one of those is to get your technical foundation sorted so step number four talking about composition and backgrounds makes a massive difference in Berbatov II and pretty much any sort of photography so what am I talking about when I talk about backgrounds well whenever you have two photographing Birds you want to be aware of what's behind the bird and around the bird you don't want anything distracting that's probably the biggest thing you don't want sticks behind or coming out of the bird's head or in front of the bird obstructing anything so whenever I'm photographing Birds I'm always conscious of what the environment looks like it's the bird isolated does the bird look good those are probably the most the key things how do you do that well you need to move around sometimes you all you set up so that I can control the environment to get the bird exactly where I want if I'm in the field and I'm not doing that I have to move around I need to see with the birdies and then it put myself in a position where the background looks good so let's have a look at an example a couple of years ago I was very fortunate to go with a couple of mates to photograph some Gang Gang cockatoos one of the most beautiful birds in Australia as you can see by this image when we first got there I found this female and I was excited to see it so obviously took this photo but I'm never going to get a good shot because it's right in the middle of this dense hawthorn bush doesn't matter where I go or what I do or what sort of lens I have I'm never going to get a good shot what did we do well we walked a lot up hills down hills you know all around this paddock trying to find a bird that had isolated itself so I've constantly got this picture in my mind of what I want to capture and I kept walking until I found an opportunity that would give me that picture so I spotted a bird a few Birds actually working towards the edge of a bush and I was actually up on a hill sort of shooting down and I noticed that the bird was making its way on this perch and it didn't have anything behind it so I waited and sure enough the female started walking along this perch I had it framed up nothing distracting and I took these shots massive differences again same lens and same camera but just a completely different location but a big difference between the two images isn't there all by me moving around and making sure the background didn't have anything distracting and that's ultimately the key the composition that's probably more of a personal thing really the composition and it's something that you'll get a feel for the more you do it I have my own style and it's very hard for me to tell you what to do but I generally use the rule of thirds so I'll have the burden and two thirds of the image and I'll leave 1/3 in front of the bird just to give it something to look into or fly into and I generally want space around the bird I don't want it too tight sometimes we have a habit of cropping in especially the Instagram crop of just cropping too tight and not giving the bird a bit of breathing room so when I'm doing my composition that's what I'm thinking about and often use there one of the lines through the eye of the bird it seems to work well for me so I've got a couple of more examples here of before and after the images on the left you'll see were taken early on when I was just photographing Birds whilst I was walking around so plenty of distracting backgrounds the composition doesn't quite feel right because the birds looking to the edge of the frame instead of into the space and overall pretty poor images however over the years I've improved on both species for the birds you know more isolated a lot less distractions in the background composition feels a lot better and overall better images no I do try and do the composition and camera if I can moving the focal point around but often majority of the time I will do some crop so just be aware that the more you crop off is often brings more noise and yet less image quality that the crop can definitely influence look at the image traditionally I used to buy three which is what the sensor gives us the ratio but occasionally I'll do more pano type stuff if the image suits it like this little red cap plug a check again that's one of the joys of photography you have a lot of creativity when it comes to this and that's great step number five probably one of the last pieces of the puzzle to get these great images and what is it well it's all about eye contact the pose and being eye level with the bird these three things will change your photography these three things will take your images from being just good to great images and it is so important it makes all the difference let's start with eye level I'm always talking about eye level and you would have seen in a couple of videos are shot I talked about a ground pod but got us nice and low with those water birds and shorebirds it's a link above if we can get a level it just becomes a lot more intimate with water birds and shorebirds it's quite easy if you've got the ground and you're shooting on a high level this way your backgrounds going to be further away and it's much more out of focus instead of standing up and shooting down to the bird you won't get a very nice background you might get a very pleasing image with birds that are too high and up in a tree you're often shooting up and you'll have a blue background which is an ideal an angle just look funny because the bird will look like it's looking down on you and you'll just get a quite strange pose so you need to avoid any of those looking down and looking up and if you can you want if you want to be eye level with the bird that's the ideal scenario and that's what I'm always aiming for the next thing is you want to get some eye contact I'm always talking about eye contact and it's just so important I think as humans we we seek out eye contact with other animals and if we don't get that eye contact we often think something's wrong if you look at these two images of a Mele ringneck one has eye contact and one doesn't I hope that you can see which one you're drawn to and which one feels like you've got more of a connection with so how do we get this eye contact well there's a few different ways take lots of photos because birds are always moving and they'll often be looking left and right and up and down and if you take enough photos hopefully you'll get one that has eye contact another little trick I use is I have to make a little bit of noise so if the birds not looking at me sometimes I'll just and the bird will look at you to see what's going on sometimes with water birds on flat sometimes I'll lift my leg a little bit and move it slightly in the birds will often look to see what that movement is and that's when you can tap the shutter and take those shots so we're always trying to get that eye contact we're also really trying to get a pose the pose is really important some boots look great one way and not another what do I mean by that some pose is a front on summer side on summer looking over your back and certain birds look great in different poses so some birds like we read about fire tail it has a bit of red on its rump as you can see in these images one of them's front on and you don't get to see this beautiful red rump the other one you do so I'm always going to prefer the image that shows the red rump because it's just the feature of the bird and I believe it looks better one of the good things is though that you can take multiple different poses and that's cool we see you know I've got some species I've probably taken 20 or 30 images off but they all look slightly different because the pose looks slightly different with a lot of birds it's really cool to get some sort of feeding behavior or some sort of action maybe they're preening or they're looking down or just doing something different flapping their wings is a good one so all these different poses can change how the image feels and looks so my tip is get high level get the bird looking at you and capture as many poses as you can and then pick which one you feel looks best so once you follow these five steps you're going to capture some pretty good images but the final step is the one that gets us those extra-special images those are the ones with a story they unique they have great appeal and that's just something special about them you can't often put it into words once you see it you definitely know it let's have a look at two images of our sacred Kingfisher this first image I've followed those five steps and it is a really good image you know it's sharp it's exposed well it's got a great pose good icon it all the things I mentioned and it is a really good image but it's just lacking something extra is something missing let's take a look at this image this has got something extra special right it's very it's not very often you see it a bird with such a big spider in its mouth and you instantly connect with it and you stare at it wow this is pretty amazing and look this image with the spider is far from perfect it's it's got the perch is way too big so the perch is too that pose isn't the best because we can't see the tail so it's missing some key elements but the behavior is what sort of lifts it up the photographer and me and and the perfectionist is I would love a blend of these two images so I'd love that first image but with the big spider and that's what keeps me going I want to get that perfect image if I can so I need to get out there and try and capture it but that shows you what I'm talking about some sort of behavior or something different to set that image apart so I remember early on in my building career I went out and had a session with a couple of photographers and they told me about a grading system that they used so from A to F a being the best net being the worst obviously and we're now photographing birds they would grade them so that they knew what sort of what they were going for with each species and where they were in that collection of bird images and you know I have adopted that sort of grading system when I'm taking images I'm going on how good is this have I got something better is this the a class image that I'm after so maybe you could try that too just so you know what sort of images you're getting so to give you an example here's an image of a black-winged stilt as follows all the steps I've talked about today it's well exposed and it is a really good image and I'm very happy with it but it's probably a solid B it just doesn't have anything extra special about it and one morning a number of years ago I went to a location a lake and I got I get to these locations early before the Sun comes up so I can find where the birds are and get into position well early one morning I walk down to the the lakes edge and I noticed these black winged stilts feeding it was just a pair of them two of them and they're in the shallows just feeding and I thought oh that's quite interesting behavior but I'll get down low they can be a little bit flighty so I you know got down low and I started crawling towards these birds just watching them and then I noticed that these birds were sort of walking towards each other feeding and so that I'll that'd make a really cool image so I started you know had my exposure and all my settings right before I started and I just started hitting the shutter and then the birds walk to each other and they were feeding and I took a heap of images and I had hope that I've got a good image but it wasn't till later when I checked that I got this image and it's probably my favorite image I've ever taken there's just something about it it's the you know it's the reflections it's the behavior it's the two birds looking at each other it just overall feels really good and it for this is what we're ultimately going for is images that create an emotional connection probably more so for me because I took the image but I hope that you like this image let me know below if you like it as much as I do but that shows you the difference between say a B and a good a image so did I do anything special to capture that image no I didn't I just followed the steps and I got lucky it's all about getting out there the more times you're out there the more opportunities you're going to get and if you can adapt and react quickly you're going to end up getting some good shots and that's the joy of it you've got to get out there give it a go and you're going to capture these images and it's exciting and fun to do that well that brings us to the end of the six steps I use these all the time and it really helps me and I hope that it helps you get out there and capture some great bird images feel free to leave the comments below if you're already using these steps or maybe there's some additional ones that I could implement if you like this content please give it a thumbs up and if you want to subscribe you can hit that little fear in in the bottom right hand corner I do appreciate all the support the channels been getting and until the next video happy birding take care and see you later

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 141,717

Keywords: Bird photography Gear Review, low shooting angle, bird photography lenses canon, bird photography canon, canon 5d mark iv, canon 500f4 ii, cameras for bird photography, photographing birds, Australian birds, Canon, Birds, how to take photos of birds, australian birds, bird photographer, bird photography tips and tricks, bird photography techniques, photography tips for beginners, how to photography, wildlife photography basics, how to photograph wild birds, wildlife photography

Id: R5VnB4CdOhQ

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020