Bird Photography In the Field and in the Backyard

Paul Miles, OVCC March 30, 2013

Topics • A Little Bit About My Background

• Our Backyard Feeders

• Steady as She Goes

• Lenses

• Fun with Composite Photographs

• How to Add Borders in Corel PSP X3

• Some Loose Ends

• Photos and Settings

A Little Bit About My Background

A Little Bit About My Background

• Born in Buffalo in 1948. Early in my youth I was given a Kodak Retina 35mm camera by, I believed, my uncle. My father later told me that it was his camera.

• Camera had no meter, one 50mm lens, and shutter speeds up to 1/500th of a second.

• Film speeds at that time were 100 ISO max and flash bulbs abounded. This first camera began an interest in photography that has continued to the present.

• Have had very little formal training as a photographer.

• After the Army I attended Cooper School of Art in Cleveland for about 6 months, but did not take a photography course.

• At Cuyahoga Community College, I took a course in black and white photography which included work in the school’s darkroom.

A Little Bit About My Background

• I also had a darkroom in the coal room of a 100 yr old house we rented for awhile.

• Most of my training has come through reading photography magazines and from on line forums.

• Many of the techniques I use I have developed myself and have not heard of anywhere else.

A Little Bit About My Background

• You may have wondered about my disability and would like to discuss it a little with you now.

• I came from a dysfunctional family and in the service in Germany jumped out a second story window after a long period of drug and alcohol abuse. My knee was so severely injured that it had to be fused.

• I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia - have been treated for this ever since by the VA.

• After my diagnosis I graduated college magna cum laude, maintained a marriage for 31 years, was blessed with the birth of two daughters and two grandsons, and worked for many years in the defense industry.

• With all the recent tragic events centered around the mentally ill, I would like to assure you that mental illness can be treated with the proper medication and support.

Our Backyard Feeders

Our Backyard Feeders

Seed & Feeders

• We purchase all our feeders & seed at Wild Birds Unlimited, Promenade Shopping Center, Forest Park.

• Owner, Tim Coats, sells my photos in his store - I respond by being a loyal customer. His prices for seed are somewhat higher than at a grocery store, but he has a wide variety of high quality seed and feeders.

Feeder Descriptions • Feeder at right, behind the post, no mess mix which is seed with hulls removed. • Feeder to left contains black sunflower oilers - a favorite of cardinals. • Red feeder on pole in back contains safflower seed which most birds like, but

squirrels and starlings do not like. • Green feeders to left of red one are suet feeders. Suet feeders attract a lot of

woodpeckers.

Our Backyard Feeders

Our Backyard Feeders

• We use hot pepper suet. Birds cannot taste the hot pepper but the hot taste keeps squirrels and raccoons away.

• Yellow feeder to the left contains nyjer or thistle, a favorite of

• goldfinches.

• Last feeder contains shelled peanuts, which are a favorite of blue jays and woodpeckers.

• Sometimes, when I am trying to catch the birds in flight around one feeder I will remove all the others. At night I take all the feeders on the deck down and bring them inside so the raccoons do not run off with them in the woods where they are difficult to find.

Our Backyard Feeders

• Far left of the deck is where I put the hummingbird feeder in the Spring.

• In addition, hummingbirds like the butterfly bush, rose of sharon, and lipstick salvia in our garden.

• Serviceberries in the woods are food for the cedar waxwings.

• A platform feeder is one feeder we do not have. It is good for feeding ground feeding birds like juncos.

• We see a good variety of birds at our feeders and pictures of cardinals and hummingbirds are our best sellers.

Wild Birds Unlimited 1192A West Kemper Road Cincinnati, OH 45240 (513) 825-7777

Steady as She Goes

Steady as She Goes

• Bird photography often requires the use of some large telephoto lens which are difficult to hold steady.

• Pictured on the next page are two means of preventing motion blur in your photos.

• Top image is that of the BushHawk Shoulder Mount which attaches to your lenses tripod collar and allows you to brace your camera against your shoulder (~$300).

• Below is shown the Wimbley Gimbal Head which also attaches to your tripod collar and allows you to rapidly follow the flight of birds (~$600).

• Induro also makes a high end gimbal head. Search Ebay for a gimbal head you can find units for around $100 and I have heard that some have had success with these.

Steady as She Goes (equipment)

BushHawk Shoulder Mount attaches to your lenses tripod collar and allows you to brace your camera against your shoulder. Costs about $300.

Wimbley Gimbal Head also attaches to your tripod collar and allows you to rapidly follow the flight of birds. Costs about $600.

Steady as She Goes • When I prefocus my camera for shots around a feeder I use a

standard tilt swivel head and just aim the camera where I want to and lock it in place.

• Monopods also work well to stabilize a camera for shots of static birds, but I think they get in the way for flight shots.

• Many of you have seen the flight shots of Ruhikant - he manages these wonderful shots simply by gripping his 400mm f/5.6 lens by the tripod mount. He is incredibly fast and accurate at capturing birds.

• One of the advantages of using the shoulder mount is that one can stabilize and trip the shutter with one hand while using the other hand to manually focus the camera.

• I have an f/6.3 lens and with a 1.4x teleconverter this becomes f/9.1 and the autofocus is of little use.

Steady as She Goes

• With the shoulder mount I can still manually focus the camera on flight shots.

• One problem I have had with the shoulder mount is the release cable. It is very easily damaged since the camera connector extends about 5/8’s of an inch out from the camera body. Replacement costs $45.

• BushHawk says it is looking for someone to manufacture a right angle connector to alleviate the problem. They also report that they don’t have this problem with other cameras. They have provided me with several free cables.

• If you can keep your shutter speed up, camera shake is not such a problem.

Steady as She Goes

• Rule of Thumb - your longest shutter speed should be the reciprocal of your focal length. If you have an effective focal length of 750mm (1.5x500mm) your slowest shutter speed should be I/750th.

• This general rule is for handheld use without any stabilization – with mechanical stabilization or image stabilization in your lens your shutter speed can be slower.

• Have heard the image stabilization is not as effective in flight shots.

• A shoulder mount and tripod both allow for slower shutter speeds.

• For static subjects I often use my 500mm lens at 1/320th of a second with the shoulder mount.

Lenses

Lenses

• One of the biggest choices you have to make in bird photography is what lens to use.

• I still have pictures I sell in my inventory which were made in 2004 with a 300 mm zoom lens and a D70 camera, but such a short focal length and small number of megapixels will mean that your chances of getting a good close up shot are minimized.

• On the other hand, if you choose a prime lens from Canon or Nikon, you can spend a lot of money.

Lenses

Canon 800mm f/5.6 at the left costs $13,000 from B&H. Nikon 500mm f/4 in the center goes for $8000. Sigma zoom 500mm f/6.3 at the right is around $1000.

Lenses

• Results with the longer Nikon and Canon primes are breathtaking. If you can afford it, I certainly would recommend such a lens.

• I have never been able to afford such a lens, so I use a Tamron 500mm zoom similar to the Sigma lens pictured here.

• I chose the Tamron lens over Sigma because it was about 50% lighter. With their huge front elements the prime lenses can be quite heavy.

• Autofocus works better with these lenses because they have a wider aperture and take in more light.

• When I use my f/6.3 lens with a teleconverter, I pretty much have to use manual focus.

Lenses

• A 500 mm f/4 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter becomes only a f/5.6 lens, which will autofocus just fine in most situations.

• Ruhikant tells me that even with the more expensive lenses autofocus can fail if there is insufficient contrast between the bird and the background or the bird is flying directly at the camera.

• Another factor in addition to focal length is the number of megapixels of your sensor and its crop factor.

Lenses

• DX sensors have a crop factor of about 1.5 which makes a 500mm lens a 750mm lens.

• Also, if you have a 16MP camera you will be able to crop your image much more than if you have a 6MP camera.

• When the megapixels of the sensor go up, the burst rate is limited, since the camera’s buffer fills up faster, so you may be able to take fewer shots in a burst.

• Finally, software can enable you to crop images more than you might think.

Lenses

• I crop my sharper images to 220 ppi and reconstitute them to 300 ppi with Perfect Resize 7, which is made by On One Software.

Fun with Composite Photographs

Fun With Composite Photographs Prefocus Technique • Image on next page is a composite of 3 separate pictures combined with layers

& masks. I like to take this kind of picture - gives the effect of the bird flying through the frame.

• My D7000 camera is mounted on a tripod with a 300 mm zoom lens at about 100 mm, about 10 ft from a feeder. I generally aim the lens slightly away from the feeder after focusing on the feeder.

• A SB800 strobe and a wireless trigger release completes the setup.

• Settings: shutter speed 1/1000th, f stop f/11, White Balance Flash, Strobe on Auto FP, manual and full power, ISO ~800.

• A strobe is important because it fills in the shadows cast by the roof of my deck and sharpens the image.

• I patiently sit and watch until a bird approaches the feeder and I trip the shutter.

• On Auto FP, the intensity of the flash is diminished so it will fire repeatedly in a burst. The SB800 screen will tell you the range of the flash on manual. I use rechargeable batteries in the strobe and switch them out after about 100 shots.

• The strobe tends to put a bull’s-eye highlight on the birds I so I paint it out in my post processing and add a more appealing highlight.

• I have brought my wireless remote and would like to demonstrate the repeated flash on auto FP.

Fun with Composite Photographs

Fun With Composite Photographs

The Panning Flight Shot

• This is another type of composite shot showing a flight sequence where the camera is panned with the bird and again fired in burst mode.

• In these photos the backgrounds do not match and it is necessary to align the image layers with the by sliding layers.

• By finding a spot in the background on two images and marking it with a small airbrushed circle you can align the two images by sliding the images until the dots merge with the mask set to a medium gray tone.

• Paint the upper layer with white and the lower layer with black and the two images will be in register.

Fun With Composite Photographs

The Limited Buffer

• Since these pictures are fired in bursts it is very easy for the buffer to fill up and shooting to cease.

• I use a high speed memory card and reduce the size of my files by shooting 12 rather than 14 bit files and employing compression on my RAW files.

• If you had to you could get even longer bursts with jpeg files.

How to Add Borders in Corel PSP X3

What follows will be a discussion of how I add the borders to my photos with Paint Shop Pro.

The slides are taken from an earlier presentation I did on PSP. I will try to add

comments on how the same things may be done in Adobe Elements.

Home Page

Deselect Auto Raw Adjustment

Full Editor

Decrease Color Depth

Crop

Note Rulers Displayed

Resize

Sharpen

Set Up Adjustment Layer

Open Adjustment Layer

Copy Adjustment Layer

Select Background Layer and Delete Adjustment Layer

Paste Adjustment Layer with Show All Mask

Add White Mask

Begin Reveal of Flower with Black Air Brush

Complete Reveal

Begin Selection for Inner Border

Drag Cursor

Remove Rectangular Selection

Merge Layers

Flood Fill Narrow Selection

Add Outer Border

Border Dialog Box

Completed Outer Border

Canvas Size Adjustment for 8x10 Print

Canvas Size Dialog Box

Finished Product

Some Loose Ends

Some Loose Ends

Here are a few topics I would like to discuss before finishing:

• Target acquisition: when a bird is flying by rapidly it is often not easy to get him in the viewfinder. Two things worsen this problem.

– If the focal length is extremely long and the camera has an DX sensor (crop sensor), the problem will be aggravated.

– An FX sensor (full frame) with a shorter focal length will find its target faster.

• If you cannot get a sufficiently large image, however, finding the target easily is of little value.

• Chromatic aberration and image quality in general will be helped by stopping down the lens particularly if there is high contrast in the scene.

Some Loose Ends

• Since I am using a relatively inexpensive lens, I always shoot at f/8 rather than f/6.3 because I get sharper images that have less chromatic aberration. Using a high end lens, this may not be the case.

• The prefocus techniques I use around feeders produce many frames with half birds and no birds at all in them. It means you will delete many frames before you find a keeper.

• Also it pays to look at your shots after about 50 frames or just to make sure your set up is correct.

• Although I showed a picture of a nuthatch with this technique, it is also very good for capturing hummingbirds around feeders.

Some Loose Ends • The garden is also a great place for hummingbirds and butterflies. • When I shoot butterflies I prefocus and attempt to anticipate their

flight. I will manually focus on a butterfly on a flower with my 300 mm zoom and trip the shutter as it begins to fly. I did not have a lot of luck this year with them, because the butterflies were scarcer than normal, but am hoping 2013 will be better.

• One of the tools I have gotten out of the habit of using is the Better Beamer. – is a flash modifier that uses a plastic fresnel lens to triple the range of your

flash. – Used with lenses 300mm or longer, otherwise it will produce a vignette.

– Can fill in shadows and sharpen photos. – Because flight shots occur at extended distances and high

shutter speeds requiring reduced power, I don’t think it’s very useful for them.

• To give the exposure a little boost, I generally set the flash on TTL at - 1.7 stops power.

Some Loose Ends • Exposure compensation can also help your bird photographs. In

general, positive exposure compensation is used when the subject is darker than the background and negative exposure compensation when the subject is lighter than the background.

• On a cloudy day positive exposure compensation can improve shadow detail when there is a white sky in the background.

• On a bright sunny day, negative exposure compensation can prevent blown highlights due to strong sun on white plumage.

• For clouds I start out at +1 and for sun I try -1.

• With my slow inexpensive lenses I have found that when I need to use a teleconverter autofocus will not work.

• I have found that flight shots are possible with manual focus.

• I also turn on Active D Lighting on my D7000 to increase shadow and highlight detail, set my max ISO to H2 in auto ISO, and turn high ISO Noise reduction to High.

Some Loose Ends

• I generally like to start looking for birds around dawn. I feel the birds will be foraging for food after going without for the night.

• In Alton IL, I was told that the eagles are roosting in trees after 10AM. Short eared owls, on the other hand, start to seek their prey after 4PM.

• Birds at my feeders seem to feed most heavily in the morning and before dusk.

• On still photographs I tend to shoot as close as I can to avoid cropping. The same is true for flight shots.

• In dealing with prefocus flight shots of insects and birds I deliberately shoot wide and crop later.

• I like to take a collapsible lawn chair with me whether I am the field, in my front yard, or on my deck.

• Also like to have binoculars with me, particularly in the field.

Some Loose Ends • For still shots, I like to use single exposures, and for flight shots

I often use the camera in burst mode. • In my prefocus shots I am always in burst mode. • Software I use for post-processing is Corel Paint Shop Pro X2. I

had X4, but, when my operating system got • corrupted, I lost X4 since I did not have it on a disk. • Also have Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and find the content

aware spot healing tool can be useful for remove twigs and branches.

• I also use Nikon View NX2 to convert my NEF files to TIFF files. • I use Perfect Resize 7 from On One Software when I need a

severe crop. • I am lucky if I keep 10% of the photos I take. I have 33,000

clicks on my Nikon D7000 already. • My wife has forbidden me to do any more time lapse

photography!

Some Loose Ends

• Some of the steps I commonly take in post-processing include the histogram stretch in PSP which stretches the picture’s histogram from black to white. Sometimes I have to undo this adjustment and do a more delicate curves adjustment.

• Cropping is also almost always done.

• I was increasing saturation 30 clicks on my images but I have since decided to go for a more natural look.

• Finally, I will often make a duplicate layer of the photo, adjust it in curves or brightness and contrast, and reveal the adjustment layer in selected areas with a mask.

• I generally don’t use auto white balance. I use either daylight, flash, or cloudy. The color temperatures for these are 5200, 5400, and 6000.

• When the sun is in and out of the clouds I recommend the flash setting.

Some Loose Ends

• Finally, I always set my camera to manual, dial in the aperture and shutter speed I need, and let the camera set the ISO on auto.

• When I am using flash I must also specify the ISO and set the flash by its range.

Photos and Settings

Ring Billed Gull in Flight

This picture was taken with a D70 camera and a 300mm zoom lens.

Male Cardinal

This picture was taken with a D70 camera and a 300mm zoom lens

Male Red Bellied Woodpecker

This picture was made with a D70 camera and a 300mm zoom lens.

Great Blue Heron Flight Sequence

Taken at Winton Woods with a D7000 camera and a 500mm zoom lens.

Tree Swallow in Flight

One of the fastest birds I have photographed.

Chickadee Flight Sequence

300mm and D7000 in burst mode.

Bald Eagle in Flight

Taken with a 300mm zoom lens.

Northern Harrier Hawk

Taken with 500mm zoom, 1.4x teleconverter, and manual focus

Snowflakes in July

Taken at Mitchell Memorial Forest with 500mm zoom, shoulder mount, flash and Better Beamer

Eastern Bluebird on Nest Box at Fernald

Taken with wireless remote, 500mm zoom lens, and tripod.

Male Ruby Throated Hummingbird

Prefocus technique.