Backlit Robin

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, amidst a bunch of branches in front of him, next to him, behind him, making focus difficult.  To make the photo a bit more challenging, the sun was almost directly behind the small but pudgy robin.  I figured this was a good composition for some challenging practice.

This little bird was a good 50 feet away from me so I knew my 200-600mm zoom lens was my best option to have this bird be large enough in the frame.  All these twigs in my view made focus a bit problematic.  The camera's autofocus always chooses the highest contrast areas that are closest to you but I wanted the focus on the robin.  I had two options to put the robin in focus and I practiced both options.  

First, one option is I could just switch my focus to manual focus so I did that.  It is always good to practice your manual focusing techniques.  I started photography many, many decades ago when only manual focus was available so this isn't anything new to me.  The quicker and more accurate you can be with manual focus, the better, especially for wildlife photography.  Another option I could use is a pinpoint back button autofocus and I used this technique for this particular shot.

With back button focusing, rather than half-pressing the shutter release button to temporarily set your autofocus point, you assign another button on the back of the camera body to handle autofocus.  The ideal button to use for this is a button on the back of the camera body that is positioned well enough to easily place your right thumb.  The right index finger is still used for the shutter release.  

The advantage of this back button focus is that you can focus on the bird and stay focused on the bird while firing off as many shots as you would like.  If you are in continuous autofocus, then the camera will keep focus on the bird.  I don't use back button focus often but I do like to use it for wildlife photography.

In this case, I fired off just one shot.  I don't like to 'spray and pray' for a good shot.  I prefer to actually choose my ideal shot by observing and carefully timing it perfectly.  As I said, this very short practice session was a challenging way to tune-up my wildlife technique. 

As you can see in the photo, the other challenge I had was that the robin was backlit.  I could have changed some settings to raise the shadows so we could see more detail in the body of the robin but I liked this silhouetted robin photo.  I have a nice sharp edge around the bird which means my focus was right on the robin.  I also like the warm light from the sun behind and above the robin which makes this a rather unique bird photo.  

Bird photographers actually obsess about capturing as much fine feather detail in the bird as possible.  This photo is kind of the opposite.  I didn't really care about capturing as much fine feather detail as possible.  This was more about the whole scene and composition.  I like the sharp robin sitting amongst out of focus twigs and branches.  The silhouetted bird sitting on a branch was what I wanted in this case.  

I'm hoping to spend a little time this summer or later this spring capturing some bird photos in our backyard.  I have always wanted to set up a tent in the yard to use as a place where I can hide from the birds.  Actually, I had planned to do this through the pandemic.  It would give me something productive to do while staying safe at home.  Unfortunately, I actually had COVID much of the time through the pandemic!  

For this backyard bird photography session, I would have a few perches for the birds just a short distance in front of the tent where they can unknowingly model for me on these perches.  I would have bird seed and water out of sight of the camera to attract the birds.  This kind of photography requires a lot of patience because it requires a lot of waiting.  Birds are never easy subjects to photograph especially small, fast, flitting birds.  I should be able to get some really nice photos though so I'm looking forward to trying this soon.

I'm certainly liking this particular photo from this morning too!