Crash course in bird photography

Saturday 1 June 2019, 14:07 by Michelle Peeters | 6,107 views | 1 comment

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Bird photography is great, but you sometimes need patience because nature cannot be controlled. With this crash course and 5 useful tips, you will quickly get more keepers.

1. Know your equipment

The hardest part of bird photography is focusing. Birds are sometimes small, but above all they are fast. Autofocus can quickly get confused. It is important to choose one autofocus point and be able to switch points very quickly. To do this, you need to know how to operate your camera without looking.

2. Buffer

>A sharp photo of a bird in flight does not happen with just one click. You shoot many photos per second and later check them on the computer to see if one is sharp. It is important to have a memory card that writes those images quickly too. Class 10 is the minimum.

3. Patience

Anyone can take a photo of a sparrow on a branch. But how do you take a special photo like that? Patience is the answer. Most professional wildlife photographers spend days, sometimes weeks, waiting in a bird hide or camouflage tent for the right moment.

4. Focusing

Birds in flight are very difficult to photograph. To 'freeze' the birds, you need a shutter speed of at least 1/1000 of a second.

As far as focusing is concerned, it is best to choose 'Continuous focus'. In this case, the camera uses several focus points to follow the bird and keep it sharp in the frame.

5. Practise

Photographing birds is mainly a matter of patience. It can therefore be a good idea to practise first. Do not head straight to a nature reserve with a hide tent, but buy a ticket for a bird park or zoo.

The birds there are much tamer and therefore much easier to approach. You will also see the most beautiful birds here, ones you will not encounter in the wild in the Netherlands.

Bird photography course

If you want to learn more about photographing birds well, the bird photography course on Photofacts Academy may be for you.

» Discover what you learn in the Bird Photography course

You can follow this and other courses for two weeks with a free trial membership.

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