Great tips Paul can't have enough BIF tips ! I got my rarest bird in this country to date, flying over the Woodford Valley near me this week awesome. If hadn't used most of these tips I would not have got my shot of the week ! Keep up the good work 👍😍
Thanks Paul for another very informative video. I will keep your tips in mind especially sun position as I haven’t paid much attention to it. The bit on stance is useful for another type of bird photography. I mean warbird photography at airshows that I’ve done many times.
Re: intermittent focussing - this has helped me massively with my basic entry-level D3500, and the keeper rate went up significantly. It's not like every shot is OK but there's definitely an improvement. But I still don't get how you manage to fill the frame with your birds so nicely, Paul. I mean my camera has more resolution and a slightly better reach than your superb 1 DX (300 mm on a crop-sensor body, so 450 mm in 35 mm equivalent) and yet, even photos where I somehow manage to get closer to the bird than I usually do, don't look as sharp as this lapwing or pelican of yours. The closest I've ever managed to get to the lapwing was this (I sent you a PM on flickr) and I still had to crop rather heavily. P.S. The proper way to focus for bird photography is the Paul Miguel way: shutter release + focus lock :-)
It's difficult to tell from a screen how good the image is. Full frame I do think helps. And I always try to get close, it's largely learning the best areas etc. A few images are cropped, but only slightly. Really interesting to hear your improvements based on the intermittent focusing.
Hello, I have adopted many of your tips into my BIF photography but one thing that few professionals go over is metering modes. Can you share which mode you use most often? Do you set it and forget it or do you change often for the situation? I have tried partial and spot but still unsure of which is best.
it's the most difficult part - there is no easy answer.! Spot metering means you have to keep the focus point on the bird, which is hard to do. With partial / evaluative, the exposure can change wildly depending on the background. I use only 2 techniques: 1. Aperture priority with some exposure compensation as necessary. 2. Fully manual - I take a test exposure then leave it. I generally prefer to use manual.
I know someone on Twitter that keeps showing video of what are clearly distorted fast flying birds or insects and claming that they are different creatures or entities. I have no knowledge or experience with filming fast moving objects clearly, so how would I explain to this person that the shutter speed or fps of the video is causing these normal things to look weird? Also, what settings or equipment would I need to tell this person to use, so that the next time they capture/film one of these "entities", they can have crips clear images of it in flight to prove its not whatever they think? A slow motion camera or something?
Great information. I noticed that more of the images you chose to use as examples showed birds with a flight path from right to left vs. left to right. Does this have more to do with human artistic preference? We read from left to right in the US and image composition of most of my images seem more comfortable with the birds entering from the right side of the frame.
