Coster - Creative Bird Photography

creative

BIRD

PHOTOGRAPHY

Essential Tips and Techniques

Bill Coster

To my wife, Diana, whose love and support for everything I do makes life so much more worthwhile.

Text and photographs copyright 2009 by Bill Coster
Jacket and interior photographs by Bill Coster

First Greystone edition 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
www.greystonebooks.com

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-545-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-55365-932-7 (ebook)

Contents

My interest in the natural world goes back to when I was child, although being brought up in the East End of London was probably not the best environment for searching out wildlife. No one in my family was interested in nature, so where or how I become so fascinated with it is a mystery, even to me. In the urban environment of my youth, it was small creatures such as insects that first caught my attention, mainly because there was quite a diverse range of them around, even in a cityscape. As I grew up and travelled further afield, my interests broadened while I encountered a much wider variety of animals and plants, particularly birds.

Photographing wildlife started as just a way of recording what I had seen, but gradually took over completely, until my trips away were centred around what I could photograph, rather than on how many different species I was likely to see. One aspect of bird photography particularly fascinated me birds in flight. In the early days of slow films and manual focus there was not an abundance of flight shots around, and I discovered that I had a knack for taking them. This enabled me to carve out a niche in the market, getting published in bird magazines and eventually signing up with one of the top natural history agencies in Britain.

While all this was going on I was working in the IT industry, so I was at rather a disadvantage to many of the full-time photographers my pictures were competing against. As my sales increased, I finally decided the time was right and gave up the day job, something I have never regretted, even for a second. Now I travel the world to photograph landscapes, mammals, plants, insects and of course birds. This is a lifestyle I would never have dreamed of as a boy, searching for caterpillars on the waste ground between houses in London.

Bird photography is a surprisingly broad subject, covering not only different aspects of birds behaviour, but also different ways of capturing this with a camera, from simple portraits to impressionist visions of the birds in their environment. To try and cover such a large subject matter in one go would be very confusing, so to simplify things I have divided the main subject of bird photography into several categories, thus allowing us to concentrate on one aspect at a time. One chapter is devoted to each of these categories, using examples of pictures that are further split into the different aspects of the subject under discussion. So, for example, the chapter on flight photography contains sections on take-off, landing and flocking, with different images used for each aspect.

The book is loosely based on a series of articles I wrote as a photographic consultant for Birds Illustrated entitled Being creative with your camera. A magazine article is necessarily quite brief, so the book contains not only many more pictures, but also more categories and much more information.

Although there is a chapter with advice on camera and computer equipment based on my own experience, the main thrust of the book is about using that most precious piece of photographic equipment your creativity. There are quite a few books on the market that deal with the nuts and bolts of how to use your camera to get pictures of birds, covering the practical side of bird photography. In recent years, with the advent of digital photography, we have learned a whole new skill-set to make the most of digital images using software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, and there are countless books on this subject. It would be pointless to repeat this information in here.

Every image in the main section of the book includes exposure details where available, and the text contains information about the circumstances surrounding the making of each picture. The main focus of the book is on creating good images of the birds you meet, going about their often complex and fascinating lives.

Photography, like any art form, is very subjective, and what one person likes another may not. There are certain general rules about composition, and I refer to some of them while discussing the pictures in the main part of the book. However, Ive never been a great stickler for rules in many aspects of life, and over the years have developed an instinct as to what works and what doesnt. Viewed in this light, rules can be seen as simply advice that could help to improve your pictures. They are not to be treated as tablets of stone, handed down from on high, but as gentle reminders that can help when starting out in the fascinating field of bird photography.

Advice on equipment is given later in this chapter, but if you are new to bird photography (or even photography itself), then a short, down-to-earth description of how to get the best out of your camera gear might be useful.

The basic effects on the image of varying depth of field and shutter speeds are not covered in this chapter, as these are demonstrated and explained in the main part of the book. Studying the images and their captions should help you to get a feel for their general use. Broadly speaking, unless you are trying to achieve a specific effect, most bird photography is done at or near the maximum aperture of the lens to allow as fast a shutter speed as possible, minimizing camera shake and freezing any movement made by the bird itself. Putting these aspects aside, we are really only left with exposure and focusing to deal with when it comes to getting to grips with the basics of how to use your camera when photographing birds.

EXPOSURE

More than any other subject, exposure seems to confuse many people. Digital makes life easier, as I explain later, but a good grasp of the fundamentals of exposure will help you understand what to do in different lighting conditions.

Three variables that you control are used to determine the correct exposure. These are:

Aperture | This sets the size of the hole in your camera lens. The bigger the hole the more light you let through. Confusingly, the aperture values are counter intuitive, as the smaller the number the bigger the hole. Thus f4 lets in twice as much light as f5.6, which again lets in twice as much light as f8. Note from this that f4 lets in four times as much light as f8 and not twice as much as you may think.

Shutter Speed | This determines how long the camera shutter will be open to accept the light through the aperture of the camera lens when you take a picture. Shutter speed settings are simple as they refer to the time the shutter is open. Thus a setting of 1/500 indicates that the shutter will be open for 1/500th of a second. A setting of 1/1,000 is twice as fast as 1/500, so will let in half as much light as it is open half as long.