Bird Watching

I have a great respect for folks who are able to capture a razor-sharp image of a small bird.

I don't seem to have any trouble photographing some birds. The birds at my backyard feeder are fairly easy: I just set up my exposure for the light around the feeder and match a fast-enough shutter speed, and I focus on the feeder itself, ensuring that the focal length is deep enough to keep birds in focus.

Most times, I set up the camera on a tripod and just click away as birds arrive at the feeder.

In a forest setting, I can usually catch larger birds—herons, geese, and ducks—if they aren't taking flight; or, if they are, they're high enough that focus isn't as big a deal.

But I have a really hard time capturing small birds that flitter from branch to branch or tree to tree. By the time I spot the bird and bring my camera to where the bird is perched, it's moved on. I find myself doing nothing more than chasing the bird through my lens and am always one step behind.

Often, when DW and I are on a bird hunt on a nature trail, we bring sunflower seeds to lure the birds from the trees and into our hands. One of us will remain still while the other focuses on the handful of seeds, and will start firing away as soon as the birds appear.

But I feel as though that's cheating.

Chickadees seem to be the most common bird on our hikes but they also seem to be the most challenging to photograph, as they never seem to sit still for more than a second or two before they've moved on. Often on a nature walk, when we're not offering food, I come out of the woods with no usable images.

On our latest visit to Mud Lake, we heard lots of singing from yellow warblers but couldn't see them in the trees. (DW has an app on her phone that detects the birdsongs and identifies the bird.) At times, we could see them, high above the trees, on their way to another spot of the forest.

I felt it pointless to even lift my camera to my face, to try to capture the bird.

But as luck would have it, I did manage to see one yellow warbler on a branch, high up in a tree, and I was able to get my camera in position, focus, and take one snap before it moved on, deeper into the woods.

300mm; f/6.7; 1/500 sec; 800 ISO

It was my first photo of a yellow warbler.

I don't know if it's the quality of my lens or the aperture, or something else, but when I saw the photo on a computer screen, it didn't seem particularly sharp. Too slow of a shutter speed for the magnification? Too high an ISO?

Perhaps a tripod would have helped, but there's just no way I could have moved the camera fast enough to capture the warbler before it moved on if the camera was mounted to a tripod. Plus, I was standing in the middle of the main path and would have blocked other visitors if I had taken up this space for very long.

How do birders know where to position themselves and their equipment?

I should talk to one of the other photogs who arrive early at Mud Lake and stake out a spot with their massive telephoto lenses. How do they do it?

If you're a nature photographer and want to share your tips, please do so in the Comments section.

Happy Friday!