Taking Up Bird Photography - Again!

In 2013 a terrible thing happened to me — a thing called grad school. Though I had once been an avid nature photographer, it just wasn't feasible to continue with my various hobbies anymore, now that I was a full-time student.

After finishing school I didn't pick up the photography again for several more years, mainly due to inertia. It's hard to get back into a challenging hobby after being away from it for a long time, because there's a lot that one has to re-learn. I wasn't even sure my gear would still work after all that time. High-tech equipment, like telephoto lenses and digital cameras, can have a high failure rate once they get old.

In 2021 I decided it was time to take up the photography again. I wasn't sure it would work out, but I figured I'd try anyway. My main concerns were whether I'd remember how to operate my camera, and whether my 13-year-old gear still worked.

I dusted off my old camera and lenses and checked that everything was still in working order. One of my camera's spare batteries would no longer take a charge, and the camera would no longer automatically switch over to the second memory card when shooting, but otherwise it all seemed operational. That was a relief.

My first chance to really thoroughly test my old gear came on a rainy weekend in February. The ice and rain made it impractical to go to the local park, so I decided to try shooting from home.

The problem with shooting birds from within your house is that you have to shoot through window glass, which severely degrades image quality. To get around that, I ended up turning my whole house into a bird blind: I turned off the heat, opened the window, and donned my warmest winter clothing. Wearing my big winter coat, my warmest hat, and my heavy gloves, I sat at the open window for 6 hours both days and shot birds in my yard. And I had a blast doing it!

The great thing about shooting birds at home is that you can position the feeder close to the window, so that you can get frame-filling shots that reveal minute feather detail. I find that I can get much closer to the birds that way than I would at the local park or nature preserve, where the birds tend to fly away as soon as they see me approaching. My feeder is so close to my window that my lens sometimes can't focus on the birds. For that reason, I use an extension tube, which allows my lens to focus closer. I also set the range limiter switch on my lens to keep it from racking in and out too much when trying to focus on a bird that's close.

Though shooting at home can be very convenient, there are a number of challenges involved. It's still possible to scare the birds away. I find that I have to be fairly still and not make sudden movements, because the birds can see me inside my house (though surprisingly, a Carolina wren did perch on my window sill at one point and watched me for about 30 seconds before flying off). And then there are the squirrels, who insist on eating all of the bird seed, and cars driving up my road that also scare away the birds.

Another challenge to shooting at home is that photos of birds at a bird feeder don't look very natural. One way to address that is to provide natural perches for them. I have a wooded back lot with many fallen branches, so it's easy for me to find a nice branch that I can mount over the feeder. Then I just shoot them when they're perched on the branch, and crop out the feeder if it's in frame.

I use a platform feeder for the seed (and for dried meal worms, which many birds love!), and I have a feeder pole next to that, which I use for mounting a branch with bungee cords. I position the branch over the platform feeder, so that the birds first perch on the branch before going to the feeder. It's natural for them to do so, because birds are inherently cautious — they like to perch high first, to look for predators, before coming down to the food.

With a platform feeder you can also place logs and other natural items on the platform for the birds to perch on, for a more aesthetic photo. The bluebird photo at the top of this article illustrates this. For that shot I had a large piece of driftwood sitting on the platform feeder, and I just waited to shoot the bird until it was on the driftwood.

It does help to swap out the branches frequently. Otherwise, all of my photos end up showing an array of different birds all perched on the same branch, which looks monotonous in a photo gallery.

Another thing to be aware of is the background. If you compare the image immediately above to the one below, you'll see that I had different branches mounted over the feeder for those two shots. You'll also notice that the backgrounds look different. This came about naturally, as a result of the shooting angle.

In the image above, the gray is from the street and the brown is from my neighbor's mulch, whereas in the image below, the green background is from my neighbor's grass. Moving the branches slightly, and shifting my shooting angle, allows me to get different backgrounds, which also helps to reduce monotony. Unfortunately, I can't easily move my platform feeder. Being able to do so would help me to increase the diversity of backgrounds further.

By the time I had taken the photos above, I was pretty sure my camera and lens still worked. Five years of being hauled around in the woods can be tough on gear. And with lenses it's important to regularly check for fungus on the glass, because it can irreparably ruin a lens if it gets inside the housing. Fortunately, all of my gear still seemed to be in working order.

And surprisingly, I seemed to remember how to use it. The main challenge for me is always with setting my exposure, since I shoot exclusively in full manual mode (for both the camera and the flash unit). You might expect that to be complicated, but it's really not. Once I set my aperture to wide-open and my shutter speed to the flash sync speed (1/300 sec), the only things left are ISO and flash power. I usually leave my flash power at 1/16 or so, and then all I have to do is turn the ISO up or down as the bird moves between shady and sunny patches. That's not that hard. I just had to re-familiarize myself with the range of useful ISO values, and that only took about an hour.

Of course, on sunny days in winter (with no foliage to create shade), it's better to turn off the flash and use high shutter speeds to freeze motion. But on dimly-lit days, or when the birds are heavily shaded, I find flash to be invaluable. Image stabilization (IS) can help with the slow shutter speeds commonly used with flash, though mechanical (in-the-lens) IS can slow down autofocus acquisition, so I rarely use it. And though many flash units support higher shutter speeds through high-speed sync (HSS), I find that HSS reduces my frame rate too much, due to the capacitors draining completely after each shot.

Flash not only lights up the scene on dark days, it can bring out colors more richly than ambient light, and it accentuates microscopic details in bird feathers. In the junco photo above, notice that there's a lot of detail even in the pure white area of the bird's underside. With just ambient light, that might show up as a uniform white blob, but because flash consists of strong, unidirectional light, it accentuates fine details by reflecting from minute feather surfaces at different angles. That fine detail is then picked up by the camera's sensor, and gives the impression of a sharper image.

Despite the many advantages of flash, it has its limitations. It's only effective at short ranges (due to physics), it sometimes creates red-eye or steel-eye in birds, and it does eat up a lot of battery juice. Perhaps the greatest limitation is that for effective flash photography, I find it best to use my camera's sync speed of 1/300 sec, to maximize flash output and conserve battery juice. That speed of 1/300 sec is very slow, and results in many photos being discarded due to motion blur.

For these reasons, I've been wanting to experiment with using high ISO to brighten up dark scenes rather than flash. The photo below was taken without flash, and you can see that the color and detail are acceptable, though there was some direct sunlight on parts of the bird, which helped. This photo was taken using a highly portable rig that consisted of a 400 mm f/4 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, for an effective focal length of 560 mm. That's a nice focal length to have in a compact, lightweight package, and really makes for an ideal hiking lens. Note that while a high-quality (meaning expensive) 1.4x teleconverter can give you a nice magnification boost without reducing image quality too much, a cheap TC can result in a noticeable loss of sharpness. And I generally don't recommend using 2x teleconverters.

In terms of using higher ISO rather than flash, my 13-year-old camera doesn't perform as well as today's newer cameras at high ISO. For that reason, I decided to upgrade to one of the newer models. The camera I ended up going with is a full-frame model, as opposed to my older crop camera that had a sensor smaller than 35 mm.

There are advantages and disadvantages to full-frame cameras. Because they spread the photosites across a wider area, they're sometimes described as providing less "reach" or magnification. In my case, because I was coming from a 13-year-old camera, I found that the newer body actually provided more detail and effective reach, basically due to 13 years of technological innovation. The new body has a 25% higher pixel density, a better anti-aliasing filter, and more accurate autofocus, all of which result in more detailed images.

The bluebird image below was one of my first shots with the new camera. I've been pretty impressed with the new camera's autofocus speed and accuracy.

Though the new camera does capture more detail on birds, it's still only a 20 megapixel camera. That's a doubling compared to my old 10 MP camera, but it's still nothing compared to some other models available today at 45 MP or more. Personally, I think that 20 MP is enough, because at some point the camera becomes limited by the resolution of the lens and my ability to hold the camera still (and to control movement of the bird).

If you compare the bluebird image above with the bluebird image below, ignoring the difference in lighting, you'll hopefully agree that both images show about the same amount of detail in the bird, despite that the image above was taken with the 20 MP camera and the one below was taken with the old 10 MP camera. I actually think it's astounding how good the photos from a 13-year-old camera can look. The newer camera is certainly better, but in many cases I have to look pretty hard to see the difference.

Also keep in mind that higher megapixels can come at a cost to image quality. Packing more photosites on the sensor means having to include more electronic circuitry (which can cause thermal issues and electromagnetic interference), and those photosites will typically be smaller, resulting in fewer photons collected per site. All of these can result in increased per-pixel noise. Thus, with higher MP ratings you get more pixels, but they may be noisier pixels. The tradeoff between more pixels and more per-pixel noise can only be accurately assessed by comparing cameras in the field and seeing which one performs better in practice.

In terms of full-frame versus crop cameras, I haven't been in a big hurry to upgrade to full-frame, though I now see that there are some advantages. For example, with a bigger sensor it's possible to spread the photosites out, and/or make them bigger, resulting in cleaner images with greater dynamic range. The chickadee image below illustrates this. Despite being a high-key image, there's detail in all parts of the scene, including in the very bright areas, due to a very large dynamic range. And by the way, I recommend always shooting in RAW format, since that can help to retain the dynamic range of your camera during postprocessing.

In some cases, a full-frame camera may also have faster and more accurate autofocus, because the AF sensors effectively have a wider window for collecting information they can use in figuring out how to adjust the focus on the lens. I've definitely noticed that my new full-frame camera can focus much faster, and more accurately, than my old 1.3x crop camera.

Fast and accurate autofocus is extremely important for bird photography. I lose many potential shots due to incorrect focus. This is especially problematic for fast-moving birds, and birds in a complex scene with many branches to distract the camera's AF system. Camera companies are still devising new ways to improve their AF systems, and this newest model I've been testing certainly shows that they've made big improvements. Some newer models now make use of artificial intelligence to detect animal and bird faces (though mine doesn't), and I would imagine this could have a huge impact on AF accuracy for wildlife photography.

One thing to consider when shopping for a new photography rig is the expected life of the camera. The fact that I'm still getting great images through my 13-year-old gear is a testament to the fact that camera life is important. Just because Canon or Nikon or Sony have come out with a newer, fancier model doesn't mean that your old camera is now obsolete.

That's why when I bought my old camera I sprung for the more expensive professional body rather than the consumer-grade model. The pro bodies from Canon and Nikon are built like tanks, because they're designed to be used by hard-working professionals who abuse their equipment by taking it out in the real world day-in and day-out. My 13-year-old pro body looks horribly beat up, but it still functions flawlessly, and I attribute that to its superior build. In the camera world, you tend to get what you pay for. With this newest camera, I expect to get at least 10 years of use out of it, which is why I opted for the more expensive model.

Keep in mind that low-end cameras are typically rated for about 100,000 shutter actuations, whereas some pro bodies are rated for 500,000. It's actually fairly easy to burn through that many shutter actuations with a digital camera, especially if you shoot at high frame rates (which I don't). Though I do recommend considering used gear if that helps you get a better camera, you also need to consider whether your camera will need a shutter replacement after the manufacturer stops servicing that model. Some companies, like Canon, won't service a camera or lens older than about 10 years.

In summary, I'm happy to report that while my old gear still seems to be working fine, the new full-frame camera has definitely been an upgrade, and with its greater capabilities it promises to transform my photography. As of now, I think I'm glad I decided to resume this very challenging (and sometimes rewarding) hobby.

Bird photography is very difficult, and I still think the greatest impediment to getting great bird photos is not the camera or the lens, but my ability to find the birds, frame them with a pleasing background, and to get close enough for a sharp, frame-filling shot. Better technology can help, but at the end of the day, I still think the most important things are patience and persistence.