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Showing posts with the label bird photography

Backlit Robin

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I was feeling "okay" this morning (which means not all that well but not terribly lousy) so I pulled out a camera and opened the living room window to see if I could find something to photograph.   I didn't feel like wandering outside.  I wasn't feeling well enough to go wandering around outside and it was still a little chilly this morning anyway so I didn't have much of a desire to head outside.  Also, it is a bit muddy out there too.  I could live without the mud and chilliness so I stayed indoors and just opened our living room window to shoot some photos from the comfort of indoors. I used a few different lenses, getting a feel for each lens (I'm a bit out of practice after the long pandemic) but the lens I used for this photo was my lens with the longest focal length.  I shot this one at 600mm...  handheld without the steadiness of a tripod.  The older I get, the more difficult holding a camera steady gets. The robin in this photo was in our spruce tree,

A New Season

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Another new season is upon us and the wildlife around the house is finally starting to come alive again. For the most part, our neighborhood has been devoid of song birds for the past few years. We see the occasional sparrow or robin during periods of migration (like now... it is the season for migrating birds) and we can hear some songbirds (although, not a lot) chirping away as the sun comes up but we really don't have the numbers we should have here around our house.  I know we have a couple of monstrous crows living in a nearby tree. Since these particular crows are quite aggressive, songbirds can consider that enough of a threat to find trees elsewhere. We also have a lot of cats in the area and those are clearly dangerous predators. Additionally, I sometimes see a Red Tailed Hawk in our area. These factors definitely limit the number of songbirds that settle down in our neighborhood so it comes as no surprise to me that seeing them is a bit of a rarity. This morning

Tripod Test

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In addition to using a tripod for these shots, I also used a small flash which can be seen reflecting in the eyes of this tiny birds. I've been wanting to try using a tripod when shooting birds over the past couple of days but the birds around the house disappeared for a few days while we had a hawk in the area. My tripod and camera sat in front of the kitchen window waiting for some birds to return so I could attempt to shoot while using a tripod. This afternoon we had a few very skittish birds out there so today was my first chance at giving this a quick whirl. I only spent about ten minutes testing what it is like to shoot with a tripod but I came away from this short practice session feeling that using a tripod for bird photography is the way to go! The tripod allowed me to shed the weight of the camera which is a tremendous help for my spinal injuries. The tripod also kept the camera rock steady. I should also point out that my spinal injuries are so severe that hand

Ready For Next Practice Session... but, No Birds

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The kitchen window where I shoot bird photography practice sessions seen in this blog. You can see the tree where these birds are normally perched in the background. As I wrote in a previous blog entry, my next step in bird photography practice is to figure out the most effective way to shoot while using a tripod or monopod. Today, I'm all set up for my next photography practice session... camera is mounted on my tripod using my Gimbal head... and tripod is setup in the kitchen in front of the window... the sun is shining... it is above freezing out there...  I'm all set... there are no birds out there though... it is silent out there... I waited for a half hour and then started looking around outside for a reason for there being no birds around.  At first, I was wondering if there were some cats out there. I moved from the kitchen to the living room to check one of the windows there. As I was peering out our living room window, I noticed some movement in a big tree

A Better Day For Bird Photography

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Black-capped Chickadee. The last couple of times that I wrote about practicing my bird photography (I practice this time of year so I am ready to consistently capture acceptable photos while at the lake house in the summer), we had mostly overcast skies which resulted in a lot of poor photos. Even the few good photos I managed to capture were rather 'flat' because the light was quite flat. Yesterday, however, was a different story. Yesterday was a very bright and sunny day. The sun was reflecting off of the snow creating even more light like an enormous reflector stretched out over the ground. These brighter conditions meant I could drop my ISO down in order to retain more detail while still keeping shutter speeds high.  This brighter environment also meant that I could stop down my lens into a much sharper zone providing me with sharper images. When you stop down a lens, the aperture gets smaller which cuts down on light getting into the sensor. When we have bright co

Breaking Away From All Those Focus Points

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Most people (photography beginners who know very little about their cameras) set their camera to one of the many "auto" or "scene" modes (although, really, scene modes are also "auto" modes). Although using "auto" modes are the easiest to use, they are far from the most effective modes to use. An "auto" mode is one of the worst modes for getting the focus right where you want it to be. I've mentioned in previous blog posts that focusing on a tiny bird in a thicket of branches can be difficult. When you are using all the camera's auto-focus points, this can be an impossible task. In auto-focus, you are allowing the camera to choose what it thinks should be in focus. The camera chooses what it thinks would be the easiest to put into focus (to greatly simplify how auto-focus works). When trying to shoot a photo of a tiny bird in a thicket of branches, the camera will most likely focus on one of the many branches in front of th

First of Wildlife Photos This Year

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It has been another quiet morning here while my health finds its "new normal" and I recover from a lingering cold amid the usual Systemic Mastocytosis symptoms and spinal pain. I did a little bit of light physical therapy for my spinal injuries and then noticed that there were some birds outside our kitchen window. I grabbed my old... very old... camera which has a Kodak sensor. I grabbed this camera only because my longest lens was already mounted on it. It is a noisy sensor and not great for overcast days like today but it was convenient for me this morning.  I went back to the kitchen and slowly opened the window... the birds scattered... but they returned within a few short minutes.  While I was waiting for the birds to return, I set the white balance, checked my aperture, checked my shutter speed and chose an ISO of 400 (which is the upper limit on this particular camera). It would be a challenge to get a crisp photo of a small bird under these conditions with this

Testing the Panasonic Lumix 45-200mm - part II

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About a week ago, I posted some photos of birds after my first 'practice session' in capturing photos of these fast little creatures with some new gear. That previous session was the first part of a series of tests of different parts of my gear used in different combinations.  (You can read that blog post here.) I'm testing some new Micro Four Thirds format photography gear to use for wildlife photography. I decided to give this format a shot after getting snagged in a few different obstacles in using other formats. So far, I have to say that this Micro Four Thirds gear is hitting a sweet spot for use in wildlife photography. This morning I happened to see a few more birds visiting my neighbor's back yard not far from one of our kitchen windows so I figured this would be a good time to test a different lens... today would be for the used lens I picked up a couple of weeks ago... the Panasonic Lumix 45-200mm Vario f4 -5.6 OIS lens.  Again, as I mentioned in my prev

Tips for Bird Photography

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I decided to write this little tip guide as a way for me to fully understand everything I've learned about bird photography thus far.  Hopefully this little self-imposed homework assignment will help me with my own bird photography as well as help others.  As I thought about all of these tips and how each of these tips manages to play upon and affect other aspects of bird photography while, at the same time, are transferable to wildlife photography in general, I knew that putting all this knowledge in writing would help to sort and organize everything in my head.  Hopefully, others whom have been struggling to capture some nice bird photos (like I had been for years) may find at least some of this information useful enough to help improve their bird and wildlife photography. First and foremost, let me point out that I am not a professional wildlife photographer.  Photography is definitely a hobby for me.  Photography is also a form of art therapy for me as a struggle with ser