The original version of this article was published as a guest post on PhotoPXL.

 When people ask me if I take pictures of birds, I say, “Yes, I do – if there aren’t any animals around…!”

I’m only joking (mostly!), but it’s true that there are a lot of ‘birders’ out there, and getting good shots of birds – particularly birds in flight (BIF) – is not that easy.

So where should you begin? Well, a lesson or course might help. I give photography lessons (both online and in person), and I often host wildlife photography workshops at the London Wetland Centre, which is a great venue for birding in south-west London. You can find an updated list on my Events page. If you don’t live nearby, you can probably find something similar closer to home.

In the meantime, let me tell you about my own approach to bird photography.

Location

Well, the first thing to do is to go to the right place. I could spend hours and hours on my balcony with my camera in my hand, and I’d never see a golden eagle or a lilac-breasted roller.

Sadly, the most colourful, beautiful and powerful birds tend to live at least a long-haul flight away from London, so it does cost money to get there.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on over 250 game drives in Africa, and that’s the kind of place where you can see a different species of bird every day.

When I spent four months working as a Resident Photographer in Tanzania and Kenya in 2019, I spotted 60 different species of animals, but 208 species of birds! A lot of them were admittedly ‘Little Brown Jobs’ (or LBJs) that were there and then gone again so quickly that the guides wouldn’t even bother trying to work out what they were.

However, I’ll never forget all the colourful rollers and wonderful birds of prey.

Everybody’s different, so I’m sure you have your own favourite places to go around the world, but it’s worth doing a bit of research online to see which countries offer the best and most numerous species and at what time of year.

In Africa, you tend to see a lot of the migratory birds in the ‘shoulder season’ in March or April, but you’ll have to go in September or October if you want to see the carmine bee-eaters nesting in South Luangwa.

Here are a few other ideas for you:

• Manu National Park, Peru

• The Caroni Swamp, Trinidad

• Kruger National Park, South Africa

• Cape May, New Jersey, USA

• Everglades National Park, Florida, USA

• Grand Isle, Louisiana, USA

• Pichincha Province, Ecuador

• Mount Desert Island, Maine, USA

• Varirata National Park, Papua New Guinea

• Point Reyes National Seashore, California, USA

• Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, USA

• Rift Valley, Kenya

Equipment

If you’re a keen birder and/or photographer, then you probably already have a decent set of binoculars, a DSLR or mirrorless camera and one or two long lenses. However, it’s worth thinking about exactly what you need just in case you need to borrow, rent or buy something else.

You don’t want to miss a rare Stresemann's bristlefront or Bahama nuthatch because you only had a 200mm lens with you!

Cameras

Photography can easily turn into a money pit, and it’s very easy these days to spend upwards of £4,000 on the latest all-singing, all-dancing Sony, Nikon, Canon DSLR or mirrorless camera, but what do you really need?

Some professional bird photographers use crop frame cameras using Nikon’s DX format or Canon’s APS-C to cut down on weight. If you have a crop factor of 1.3, for instance, that effectively makes a 100mm lens into a 130mm lens – or a 400mm lens into a 520mm one.

However, that benefit comes at the cost of a smaller sensor, and I always want as many pixels as I can, so I’d still recommend a full-frame DSLR.

Personally, I used to have a Nikon cameras. I went through the D800, D810 and D850 series before upgrading to two Sony ⍺1 camera bodies. Recently, I swapped one of my ⍺1 camera bodies and most of my lenses for a Nikon Z8 and a NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S lens. There are two good reasons for that:

• Pre-release capture

• Built-in 1.4x teleconverter

Now let’s take a look at the features you should be looking for in a wildlife photography camera.

Apart from subject detection and pre-release capture, most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras offer the same basic functions. These are the ones you’ll probably need the most for bird photography.

A large sensor

Size isn’t everything, of course, but having a full-frame (35mm) sensor with at least 20 megapixels is pretty much essential.

The larger the sensor, the better your low-light performance and the less noise you’ll have in the image.

The more pixels you have, the more detailed the image can be and the more you can crop in on your subject. My D810 had 36.3MP, and my D850 and Z8 45.7MP, but my new Sony ⍺1 has 50MP. ‘Nuff said.

A high frame rate

This allows you to take several bites at the cherry.

Even if you’re only taking a portrait, it’s always worth taking a burst rather than just single shots. Birds behave erratically, so you need to make sure they don’t close their eyes or turn their heads at the crucial moment.

That goes double for action shots. The higher your frame rate, the higher your chances of getting great shots – particularly when you’re using a slow shutter speed or when you’re taking pictures of a bird taking off from a branch.

When I used DSLRs, I was a Nikon man, but the frame rates were dreadful! My old D800 could only manage 4fps, my D810 5fps and even my D850 only 7fps unless I used my MB-D18 battery pack, which boosted it to 9fps. By comparison, the Canon EOS-1D X Mark II could give you 14fps with full autofocus. Sigh…

Fortunately, the mirrorless revolution has solved that problem for me and millions of other photographers. My Nikon Z8 shoots at 20 fps (or up to 120 fps in JPEG), and my Sony ⍺1 can manage 30 fps—albeit in lossy compressed format.

Pre-release capture

OM SYSTEM cameras have offered Pro Capture Mode for years, and other manufacturers are now copying the feature. The idea is that you half-press the shutter or use back button focus when you think the action’s about to start. The camera then starts shooting, saving a few frames to the buffer until you fully press the shutter. At that point, it writes the previous frames to your memory card and continues as usual.

This is a hugely valuable feature for bird-in-flight photography, and it’s a shame that so few cameras have it. However, that should change dramatically in the next few years, and you see it already in the Canon EOS R1 and the Sony ⍺1 II.

Using my new Z8 with pre-release capture means I never have to miss a bird taking off any more. It’s like a photographic time machine. As soon as I see the bird take off, I press the shutter, knowing that I’ll get all the shots I want.

I don’t have to have the reactions of a mongoose any more, and that means I don’t get frustrated and annoyed when I’m too slow to take shots of a lilac-breasted roller or a little bee-eater taking off.

Yes, the Z8’s pre-release capture mode is currently limited to JPEGs, but you still get a full-frame 45.7MP JPEG file, and I’m hoping Raw shooting will be added in the next firmware update.

Back button focus

Having to press the shutter to activate your camera’s autofocus is not very convenient if you want to photograph a bird in flight or even just a Bird on a Stick (BoS).

With back button focus, keeping your thumb pressed on the AF/AE lock button allows you to keep the autofocus active even while you’re shooting a burst of frames, and if you just press it once and let go, that will lock the exposure and focus so that you can reframe your shot.

This ability to ‘focus and recompose’ is particularly useful if you have a DSLR and the eye of the bird is outside the central focus point area as there’s no other way to do it.

Continuous autofocus (Nikon’s AF-C mode or Canon’s AI Servo)

There are lots of very complex autofocus systems out there now, some of which can even automatically track the eye of an animal in motion, but the very least you need is some sort of continuous autofocus.

Bird photography would be a lot less interesting if you could never capture a bird in flight, and for that you need your camera to update its focus constantly.

There are many different options, but the one I prefer on Nikon cameras is AF-C 3D, which, as you might imagine, allows a bird to be tracked in three dimensions while it’s in flight.

Mirrorless cameras tend to have zones while DSLRs tend to have collections of spots in the central area, so this is an area where mirrorless has the advantage.

Subject detection

Another valuable feature that you just can’t get with a DSLR is subject detection. Mirrorless cameras can now automatically locate and track the eye(s) of your subject, whether it’s a person, an animal, a bird, an insect, an aircraft or a car!

Sony’s AF system is probably the best on the market—especially if you get a recent model like the ⍺7R V or the ⍺1 II. However, you still need to tell most cameras exactly what you’re shooting—which can be very frustrating!

Exposure compensation button

Birds tend to spend a lot of time in the sky, so there’s a real danger of underexposure. In addition, you might be photographing a white bird against a dark background, which might make you clip your whites.

One way to stop that from happening is to use a stop or two of positive or negative exposure compensation. There are other ways, too, but it’s always nice to know your camera has that option.

Auto ISO

My default wildlife shooting mode is Manual with Auto ISO.

Unless I’m taking a slow pan shot in bright light, when I have to set the ISO manually to get the extended value of 31 on my D850, I use Auto ISO so I can focus on the aperture and shutter speed.

Those are the settings that really matter, so I don’t have to worry about the ISO most of the time.

Lenses

If you’ve gone the full-frame DSLR route, then you’ll need a minimum of a 400mm lens to give you the chance of great bird shots. Birds are often small and far away, so the range of your lens is crucial.

That focal length is a bit of a watershed in terms of weight and price: anything over 400mm is likely to be very heavy and very expensive!

Personally, my two favourite wildlife lenses are my Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6G VR and my Nikon AF-S 800mm f/5.6 E FL ED VR, which has a dedicated 1.25 teleconverter that increases the effective focal length to 1000mm.

I put the 80-400mm on my D810 and the 800mm on my D850, and I’m good to go. The shorter lens gives me the flexibility to zoom in and out to get the best composition if the bird is large and/or nearby while the ‘big dog’ lets me make sure I fill the frame even if the bird is the length of a cricket pitch away.

The only downside to having these two lenses is the cost: I had to shell out over £1,000 for the 80-400mm, but the 800mm was over £15,000…!

Price is obviously an issue here, and there aren’t many photographers who can easily afford such expensive lenses, but it’s easy enough to rent a long lens for a short trip, and that’s what I did for a number of years before buying my own.

If you’re a Canon user, you might consider the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM L Series with built-in 1.4x Extender. That’s around £10,000 to buy new, but only £7,000 used, and you could rent one for a week from Lenses For Hire for £417.

Settings

You’ll need to use two completely different sets of settings for bird photography, depending on whether you’re taking portraits or birds in flight.

Portraits

I generally photograph birds wide open (f/5.6) at 1/1000 of a second with Auto ISO, but circumstances differ.

The obvious difference between small birds and large is that the smaller ones tend to move more quickly – whether they’re flying through the air or just perching on a branch. That means you need to think carefully about your shutter speed if you’re shooting in low light. Can you afford to reduce the shutter speed, or would it be better to shoot at a higher ISO?

The other issue is exposure compensation. If the bird is backlit and you have to dial in a stop or two of positive exposure compensation, then that has to come from somewhere. A shot at ISO 1600 might be acceptably free of noise, but what about at 3200 or 6400?

The general rule is that a noisy but sharp shot is better than a clean but blurred one, but you have to draw the line somewhere…

Fortunately, a solution has presented itself in the form of Topaz Photo AI. This software program covers both bases, allowing you to ‘recover’ images shot at very high ISOs while letting you sharpen the image even if it suffers from motion blur.

My recommendation, therefore, is that you err on the side of caution when it comes to your shutter speed. If it’s quite dark but you have time, you can use the doubling rule. Start with a high shutter speed and gradually work your way down, doubling the length of each burst as you double the length of the exposure so that you give yourself the best possible chance of a ‘keeper’.

However, birds do have a habit of taking off at the most inconvenient times, so you may not get the chance to experiment! If that’s the case, try running your shots through DeNoise AI and/or Sharpen AI. That might just do the trick.

Birds in Flight

Taking pictures of a bird on the wing is a whole different kettle of fish. Not only do you have to worry about the motion of the bird, which can make your AF system struggle a bit, but you’ll often have to cope with a backlit subject or a bright bird against a dark background.

Take-off Shot

For a ‘standard’ shot of a bird in flight (rather than a slow pan), the best approach is probably to wait for it to take off—especially if you’re lucky to have pre-release capture!

Here’s what my settings would be:

• Exposure mode: manual with auto ISO

• Shutter speed: 1/2000-1/5000 of a second, depending on the size of the bird (smaller birds tend to be faster so need faster shutter speeds)

• Aperture: wide open (f/4 with my 600mm lens)

• Back button focus

• Pre-release capture turned on—if you have it!

• Vibration Reduction (Nikon) or Image Stabilisation (Canon) turned on. (I know some people suggest turning it off on the basis that your shutter speed will be high, so you don’t ‘need’ it, and it might even slow down focus acquisition, but I like the bird to stay in the same place in the frame rather than wobbling around all over the place!)

• Set the focus limiter on your lens (to speed up autofocus)

• Auto AF, Wide Area AF, Spot AF or 3D continuous autofocus (the smallest box that you can reliably keep over the head of the bird)

• If you’re shooting white birds, use one or two stops of negative exposure compensation. (Highlight-weighted metering can help with this, or you can always use full manual for mixed-tone backgrounds and meter off any mid-tone area in the right light, such as a patch of grass in the sunshine.)

However, this is not the only possible approach. Some photographers like to ‘simplify’ things by using shutter priority, some like to use the shutter release to focus and some like to pre-focus on a mid-tone object at a similar distance to the bird (to stop the autofocus from ‘hunting’) and then lock the ISO manually to avoid having to use exposure compensation.

All I can suggest is that you experiment and take plenty of shots using different methods. Practice makes perfect!

Slow Pan

For a slow pan, you should manually set the ISO to the lowest possible setting of 32 for Nikon and 50 for Canon and Sony (as the Auto ISO settings don’t use extended values) and switch to shutter priority mode, leaving all the other settings the same apart from the shutter speed.

Here’s what my settings would be:

• Exposure mode: shutter priority with ISO at the lowest extended value (32 or 50)

• Shutter speed: 1/15-1/20 of a second (depending on how good you are!)

• Aperture: set automatically

• Back button focus

• Vibration Reduction (Nikon) or Image Stabilisation (Canon) turned on.

• Set the focus limiter on your lens (to speed up autofocus)

• Auto AF, Wide Area AF, Spot AF or 3D continuous autofocus (the smallest box that you can reliably keep over the head of the bird)

• If you’re shooting white birds, use one or two stops of negative exposure compensation. If the bird is flying through a bright sky, do the opposite and overexpose by a stop or two.

In Africa and other places with bright sunlight, you might even have to use a variable Neutral Density (ND) filter to keep your aperture down. Modern lenses often max out at f/22, so if you need a narrower aperture, your shots will be overexposed as the camera has nowhere to go!

A slow pan involves ‘panning’ across with the bird to track its motion. It’s called a slow pan because you need to use a slow shutter speed to blur the bird’s wings and the background while keeping the head sharp.

The idea is to make bird-in-flight shots more dramatic and dynamic. If you use a high shutter speed to freeze the action, it’s hard to tell how fast your subject is going, and there’s no sense of energy.

Imagine taking a shot of a Formula 1 car going around a circuit at 200mph. If you dialled in 1/2000 of a second, it would look like it was parked on the side of the road, wouldn’t it?

However, if you used a tripod and shot it at 1/100 of a second, the driver’s helmet and the chassis would be sharp, but the wheels and the background would be blurred. Imagine the colourful stripes of the advertising hoardings in the background…

It’s true that your hit rate won’t be as high, but when it comes to setting the shutter speed for a slow pan, you have to be brave to get results!

The smaller the bird, the faster and more unpredictable its flight. You’ll have to experiment, but here are a few starting points:

• Small birds (guillemots, kittiwakes and any LBJ): 1/125 of a second

• Medium-sized birds (rollers, toucans etc): 1/80

• Large birds (eagles, vultures etc): 1/30

To sum up, a slow pan can very effectively turn a good shot into a great one. You should try it sometime…

Fishing

A classic action shot shows the moment when a kingfisher explodes out of the water after catching a fish. This is very difficult to capture in the wild, but the settings aren’t too complicated. They’re pretty much the same as for a take-off shot. The tricky part is the technique, which we’ll come on to next…

Technique

There are a couple of constants that apply whatever shot you’re trying to get.

• Find a place where there are plenty of birds flying around.
  It sounds obvious, I know, but still…!

• Go out around sunrise or sunset.
  That’s when you’ll find the best light, and that’s always the most important variable in photography, which is simply ‘painting with light’. In addition, there should be more activity at those times, especially at dawn.

Portraits

You’re probably going to be using a long lens for bird photography, so one of the most important things to remember is what I’d call ‘camera technique’.

It’s very easy to end up with slight camera shake when you have to hold a big lens steady, and that’s magnified by the long focal length, so it’s important to make sure that it’s well supported and that you gently press the shutter release. Imagine you’re a sniper: take a deep breath, let it out half-way and gently squeeze the trigger…

I go to Africa for most of my photographic trips, and that means I’m usually in a jeep, resting my camera on a beanbag either on the window sill or the edge of the roof. Beanbags are very good at keeping a heavy camera and lens stable, so you should make sure you use one if you can. (You can always buy one yourself and fill it with beans or rice when you get to your destination.)

The other thing to bear in mind is etiquette. I’m not talking about holding the door open for anyone here. What I mean is that birds can be very skittish, so moving very slowly and keeping the noise down is crucial. I’ve missed goodness knows how many shots because some idiot has spoken too loudly or dropped a lens cap and frightened off the bird.

Birds in Flight

Technique is just as important as camera settings for bird-in-flight photography. There are various guidelines, but it all depends on your particular circumstances:

• Birds tend to take off and land into the wind, so try to position yourself upwind of your subject (if you want pictures of its head rather than its tail feathers).

• Try to keep the sun directly behind you to minimise shadows on the bird.

• Choose what type of shot you’re going to take and make sure all your settings are correct.

• If your lens has a collar, make sure it’s twisted up above the lens so that it doesn’t get in the way.

• If you don’t have much space or time to focus, pre-focus on an object a similar distance away from where you think the bird will be. That’ll help the AF system lock on as soon as possible.

• Rinse and repeat.
  In other words, check your shots on the back of the camera, make any adjustments you need to make and have another go.

Take-off Shot

One way of getting good shots of birds in flight is to find a bird that’s perched on a branch and simply wait for it to fly away. I’ve done this plenty of times with lilac-breasted rollers in Africa.

They have a habit of perching on dead trees by the side of the road, so it’s quite easy to stop and set up shop about 20 yards away – which is about the ‘minimum safe distance’ for those birds.

I make sure I’m in a comfortable, rock-steady position with the bird facing me, ideally with the wind and sun behind me so that the bird takes off towards me (or at no more than a 90° angle). I then dial in my basic settings and wait for it to take off.

The point here is to catch the bird just taking off from its perch when its wings are likely to be raised. This works particularly well for rollers as they have such beautifully iridescent turquoise and blue colouring. However, they take flight very suddenly and unpredictably, so a high frame rate and pre-release capture are very helpful!

It’s impossible to try and track them with your camera. All you can do is lean on the shutter release as soon as the bird takes off and hope the buffered frames catch it with its wings in the perfect position and its feet just touching the branch.

There are no guarantees that a bird will take off, but there are a few possible warning signs:

• It might poop.

• It might turn into the wind.

• It might start staring at something, eg possible prey.

• It might become restless.

• It might hunch down.

• It might call, sing or squawk.

• It might need a running start.

Occasionally, birds don’t take off when you want them to. Very frustrating. If that’s the case, then I leave it to you and your conscience to decide what methods you use to ‘encourage’ them…!

Slow Pan

The slow pan is one of the hardest shots to master, but here are a few technical guidelines:

• Keep your elbows in.

• If you’re using a bean bag, support the lens hood with it and hold the camera with both hands (like the tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber!).

• Press the camera firmly against your forehead.

• Move around with your big muscles (your legs and torso) rather than with your arms and neck in order to keep the movement as smooth as possible.

• Practise beforehand to get a feel for it and make sure you have enough room (if you’re in a jeep).

• Follow the bird for a second or two before taking any shots to get used to its speed of movement.

• Take a burst as the bird flies past.

• Stop taking shots as soon as the bird starts to fly away from you, but keep panning smoothly across for a moment or two.

• If you lose focus, let go of the back button or shutter button and try again. Otherwise, every single shot will be blurred!

• Optimise your settings and technique. Whatever your approach, it’s always worth checking your shots in the EVF and experimenting to improve them. It’s an iterative process.

• Don’t give up! Yes, I know the hit rate is going to be dreadful, but that’s no excuse…

Fishing

Trying to photograph birds fishing from the hover or a perch is very difficult. The problem is that they start off in one position but need to be captured somewhere else—and it’s impossible to focus on both at once!

One way is to observe the bird’s behaviour, focus on where you think it’s going to hit the water and then hit the shutter when it starts its dive. This only works if you’re watching the bird with your naked eye—so you can’t even look through the viewfinder!

As you might expect, your hit rate isn’t going to be very high with this method. A better way is to try and keep the bird in shot all the time. I got plenty of chances to practise this with a pair of malachite kingfishers in Zambia recently.

It was a real challenge to get sharp, well-composed images—even using pre-release capture on my Nikon Z8. The main problem was that I couldn’t park close to the bird and get both the top of the post and the water in my viewfinder if I used my 600mm lens.

After a few attempts, I gave up. I was either missing the bird entirely as it flew down to the water, or it was out of focus. At that point, I decided to switch to my Sony ⍺1 with the 70-200mm lens.

The wider angle of the zoom range meant that I didn’t have to move my camera much, if at all, when the bird dived into the water. I could focus on it when it perched on top of the post and, by putting it in the top left- or top right-hand corner, I could leave enough space for it to fly into.

I started out at 1/3200 and f/13, which gave me an ISO of 5000 as it was so dark. Later on, I was desperate enough to push it to 1/5000 and f/16! Once I’d taken a couple of good shots, I dialled back the shutter speed to 1/4000 and the aperture to f/10.

The next problem was that it was no good having the bird catching prey in the very corner of the frame as that would mean I’d have to crop in very tightly, so I had to move the camera to follow the bird more than I thought. To do that, the optimal focal length was just over 100mm.

It was certainly a challenge, but it was great to be able to ‘work the problem’ and end up with results I was happy with.

Post-processing

I use Lightroom to edit all my images. There’s not much to say that’s specific to shots of birds, but I’m a great fan of technology, so I’m happy to use whatever software ‘fixes’ I can in order to get the perfect image.

I know some people are ‘purists’ and refuse to clone anything out of a wildlife image, and it’s true that some competitions simply don’t allow you to do that. However, my goal is to produce the very best shots I can, so I don’t care what methods that might involve. I obviously won’t break the rules if I’m entering a competition, but everything else is fair game.

Most of my best shots have had a huge helping hand from Lightroom (as you can see from some of these examples), and I’ve recently started using Topaz DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI. I’ve been very impressed with both products, and they help solve two problems that are common with wildlife shots in general and bird shots in particular:

• High noise levels in low light conditions

• Motion blur or lack of sharpness caused by camera shake or a moving subject

They’re not cheap to buy, unfortunately, but I’m an affiliate for Topaz Labs these days, and you can get 15% off if you click here and quote discount code nickdale15.

DeNoise AI is the best software on the market for reducing noise in your images. Lightroom does all right with colour noise, but it’s far inferior when it comes to luminance noise.

Sharpen AI is also the best sharpening software on the market because it does exactly what it says on the tin! If you try to ‘sharpen’ an image in Lightroom, all it does is play around with the contrast. That’s not real sharpening. Sharpen AI, on the other hand, actually reduces blur in the image with three different options:

• Motion blur (for camera shake or moving subjects)

• Out of focus (when the camera has focused just before or just behind the subject)

• Too soft (when the image is not sharp enough for any other reason)

If you choose the four-pane comparison view, you can see the original image and compare each style of sharpening. You can then pick the best one and play around with the settings. The auto option is the place to start, but feel free to tweak the Remove Blur and Suppress Noise sliders to try and get the perfect result. It’s always a trade-off between sharpening and noise reduction, so you’ll just have to take a view on what balance works best.

Topaz has recently updated the software so it’s much quicker to render the previews and save the final image.

It’s always important to get as much as possible right in camera, but let’s not forget what the wonders of technology can do for us!

Good luck…!

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