Taking photos of birds

I’ve been taking macro photos for some years now and was up for a change. Birds! I thought. Not that macro doesn’t pose a challenge for me, I just felt like trying something different (and one of those huge white lenses… yum!).

I just started out this year. Being fascinated by some of the astonishing work shown by inspiring people (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) I thought “Well, just how hard can that be, I mean with one of those fantastic tele lenses and all..”  I could hardly wait! I’m a capable biologist, I know where to find birds. I’ve seen tons of interesting motives and species.The amazing mind-baffling images of raptors that I was going to take, were already scrolling through my imagination. So is this going to be a post with all sorts of amazing bird photos?
Nope.
I can’t show you any such pictures. I haven’t taken them…. It turned out to be a tad more difficult than I had anticipated.

This post is about one of the difficulties in taking photos of birds. Distance. Overwinning it, getting close enough without startling the motive. Not that I’ve overwon this challenge. Not at all. I’m still battling with it, but I remember being surprised the first time I bought a tele-lens by how close you actually have to get to a bird-sized motive. You might think, as I did, with a huge magnificent magnifying lens at the end of the camera all you need to do is go out, sit down and wait for the birds to fly past as you from a far distance while you snap them down to your memory card one after the other (click! click! click!). Prepare for disappointment, there is a lot more to it than that.

Whilst doing the dishes the other weekend there was a bit of an incident in the back yard, which presented me the opportunity to photograph a live subject at changing focal lengths, whilst noting the exact distance. There was plenty of time to swap lenses. The shot of the Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) enjoying a snack, is taken with a focal length of 300mm and is un-cropped. So how far away am I from this beast. No further than 7m (23ft).  Now that’s pretty close in my book.

"Dont even think about moving closer!" The sparrowhawk in my garden shot with a 300 mm (480 mm with crop factor) at a distance of 7m (23ft).

Getting this close to a bird on the lookout, without a hide of some sort, is something of a test, and doesn’t occur often (Luckily for me, I had my apartment building as hide. This photo was taken from the comfort of my bed out the bedroom window).  Usually I get within 25-30 meters and the bird will give me a slightly annoyed look (as if saying “you just HAD to get in to my private sphere?” or “I heard you coming a mile away, why do you even bother?” then it will spread its wings and lazily flap off in the opposite direction. For comparison the images below are taken at other (smaller) focal lengths.

Photos of the sparrowhawk in the backyard. All the photos are uncropped and taken at the same distance of 7m, but with varying focal lengths.

All shots are taken on an Canon EOS 20D so strictly speaking the focal length should be multiplied by the cameras crop factor of 1.6.

So how do I plan on getting those dreamy shots I had in mind. Like most amateur photographers taken by the challenge of photographing birds, I’ll probably upgrade to a 400mm sometime past eternity when I get the money. Then I’ll be adding a 1.4 teleconverter. Somewhere along the road I will get a hide. I wouldn’t mind a new camera with more pixels either, that way I might be able to crop the images a bit… but realistically, the best and most likely step for me is just to get out there and take more pictures. In the end an extended knowledge about the behaviour and habitat of the bird, that I want to photograph, and preparation in selecting a suited site will get me a huge part of the way, and a hide doesn’t have to be all that fancy and expensive. As long as I’m hidden, it should do the job.