Tips for bird photography

Bird photography, especially wild bird photography can be quite challenging. After several years of photographing birds, I decided to write this “How to photograph birds”.

Here are some guidelines to your camera settings:

• Focus: Focus on the eyes. In a portrait, our entry point are the eyes. If they’re not sharp, then you’ve probably missed the shot.
• Camera Mode: I favour Aperture Priority for most cases. It gives you the freedom to quickly adjust your depth of field.
• Aperture: Go for a shallow depth of field. You want to separate your subject from the background. If your lens is high quality, you should be able to shoot wide open without a substantial loss in sharpness. (Lower quality lenses may need to be stopped down a bit to achieve a sharp image). Use a long lens in the 300–600 range set to an aperture of f2.8, f4, or even f5.6 in the long range. It will create good separation between your subject and the background.
• Shutter Speed: choose a shutter speed that is fast enough to attain a sharp image. If you lose sharpness due to motion blur, or shake, you’ll have missed the shot. A good rule is that when hand-holding a lens, you need a shutter speed at least as fast as your lens length. Twice as fast is even better.
• ISO: Depends on lighting, but choose one as low as you can without lengthening your shutter speed.

All the guidelines and advice in the world, however, is not equal to what you will learn by going out and doing it. So start there.
Go out and practice. Learn your cameras, and play with the camera settings for bird photography.
Use this is a starting point, but then grow and find what works best for you, and then share your results with me!

For more tips related to photography : https://www.instagram.com/siddique_sculpture/