For The Birds . . .
I am not a nature photographer, but several times a year I haul out my tripod and cantankerous old 80-320mm zoom lens and take some bird pictures. This activity is usually motivated by a new visitor at the feeder, such as the recently spotted
rufous towhee.
Photographing birds is not easy. Right off the bat, there's the problem of getting close enough. Even with a long telephoto lens, songbirds are small. Creeping up on birds is almost impossible so you sit around and get cramped and out of sorts before the birds decide you are a part of the scenery and come in close enough to photograph.
 |
| Cardinals turn up unexpectedly |
The next problem is getting the birds to stay still long enough to take a picture. With some birds, patience and anticipation combined with a fast shutter wins the day. Often enough, luck is your only friend, and with some birds, even luck is not much help. I have never taken an unblurred picture of the tireless and nervous titmouse. And even if the bird does stay still, camera shake at long focal lengths is likely to produce some blurry shots, and in all probability, the shot with the best pose and light will be one of the blurry ones.
 |
| Who's got the focus? |
If that is not enough, consider the problems of focus. In order to minimize the effects of camera shake and flitting birds, you select a fast shutter speed. Working in natural light, this almost always means a fairly wide apeture which reduces the depth of field to somewhere around about 1/64 inch. What you get is a tack sharp beak tip in the middle of a vaguely bird-shaped ball of fuzz. And what about focusing? My sixty-some year old eyes are not too reliable, and the camera's auto-focus is not to be trusted. Just as I get ready to snap the shutter, the camera, whirring and grinding, shifts focus to a chinaberry tree on the other side of the yard. The bird flies away.
It is really all too much. So after a couple of hundred exposures, I put the tripod away and hope that luck will have intervened to give me one or two useable pictures. I am not a nature photographer, but I sure would like to have a nice picture of that towhee. I wonder if taxidermy is real expensive?
Man I can relate to all you said. I have tried "digiscoping" and have had some luck but birds are tough to shoot no matter.
ReplyDeleteVery nice blog you have here.
Thanks Don, and yes, birds are tough. The scope idea sounds interesting--someone was asking me about this the other day and I had to confess that I didn't know anything about it. I assume you are talking about a camera attached to some type of telescope?
ReplyDeleteJust like you I very rarely take bird pictures and when I do it, I encounter exactly the same problems.
ReplyDeleteI guess if we were nature photographers we would not be Pentax users.
Regards
Diego--you are probably right, the way to go would be some of those long, stabilized Canon lenses. Problem is, I don't want to mortgage the house to pay for them. I guess I will just stick with the Pentax gear I have, and not worry too much about the birds.
ReplyDeleteNice pics Edd - I've never had any luck photographing birds. We have beautiful red tailed hawks here and even as large as they are I've never been able to sneak up on one.
ReplyDelete