Photographing Birds In Flight

Photographing birds in flight and capturing their gracefulness is a challenge that any wildlife photographer should rise to. On this page you’ll discover more tips for photographing flying birds.

Best Time for Flight Photography

The best time of day for flight photography is during the golden hours just after sunrise or just before sunset. This isn’t just to get the bird lit with beautiful golden light - the sun is lower in the sky so the underside of the bird will be better lit. The underside is often in shadow because you’re shooting from below the bird and the sun is above it.

Another great time is when there’s snow on the ground. The light reflects off the snow and lights the underside even better.

Express Your Creativity by Blurring

If you want to express your creativity a bit further then have a go at taking some blurred images of birds in flight. You can spend countless hours experimenting with this and produce some interesting and unusual images that portray a sense of movement.

It’s also a great thing to do when the light levels are low.To take these shots just reduce your shutter speed to less than 1/125s and experiment with panning with the bird(s) and with stationary shots.

Some wonderful effects are achieved by doing this with entire flocks of birds.

Photographing Flying Birds On Mass

Photographing birds in flight can also mean capturing birds in flocks. Starling murmurations are one of nature's great spectacles. Check out this video before we talk about some of the photos.

Including the trees in the frame gives a sense of scale to the number of birds.

When photographing birds in flight in this situation we're effectively going for a silhouette, so this was underexposed by a stop to get more detail in the sky.

Suddenly the Starlings start to fly incredibly close to each other and become flowing shapes in the sky. The reason becomes clear.

If you look carefully you'll see a bird in the top right corner away from the flock...

...it's a Peregrine Falcon, bad news if you're a Starling.

It is thought that by flying together like this the Starlings have safety in numbers. Confusing birds of prey who are looking for a single target.

Once you've got some images of frozen birds in flight try slowing the shutter speed. Here 1/4 second was used.

This gives more impression of motion.

If your lens has a focus limiter use it

A lot of lenses have a switch which will allow you to limit the focus range. For example the Canon EF 400mm lens has two ranges 3.5m to infinity and 8.5m to infinity. I use this lens a lot for birds in flight and always have it set to the 8.5m to infinity range.

What does this do? It simply reduces the range that the lens tries to focus over which results in it acquiring focus faster. This is critical when photographing birds in flight.

Recovering Focus When Its Lost

When tracking a bird, sooner or later your camera will lose it. Don’t make the mistake of keeping your button half pressed on the shutter to attempt to recover focus. Simply move your finger off the button and re-acquire focus in the normal way.

I hope you'll get as much enjoyment photographing birds in flight as I do. Please check back because these pages get updated as we get different pictures. On the home page you can subscribe to our ezine and you'll be the first to know when new pages are put up.

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