HAVING A GO AT BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY

Size really does matter in bird photography…

Taking pictures of birds is difficult : they’re small, shy and the little buggers won’t keep still. I gave it a go a few days ago, despite not having the right gear for the job. You need big lenses with high magnification and cameras that can fire rapid bursts and have tons of megapixels. All that stuff is, of course, very expensive, so I had to make do.

I’m used to taking pictures of landscapes and buildings, so I did some research to see how to go about it. There’s a contradiction right from the start : you need to shoot at a high speed because birds keep moving, but that means less light is entering the camera, so you have to crank up the ISO to compensate. High ISO means a grainy picture with artifacts. You can help matters by leaving the aperture nearly wide open to maximise the light coming in, and this also has the benefit of making the background blurry and your bird stand out. Then you need to have your camera set on continous focus mode triggered by a button on the back of the camera, not the shutter release. All sounds quite complicated, right?

Well, I walked down the small river near my place where I found an egret, a heron and a wagtail to photograph. Then on to the big river, where there are tons of ducks and cormorants.

So far I’ve only processed one pic (using Affinity Photo 2) - most of the others were defective in one way or another. The processing was quite a challenge - you have to denoise the shot to reduce the artifacts created by the high ISO, but you also have to sharpen to bring out the details. These two things kind of cancel each other out. I had to use various masking techniques too, always a bit fiddly and time-consuming.

Anyway, this is the result. Not too bad, considering my consumer-grade lens of an unsuitable magnification, although a pro would laugh at it.

It’s a pair of great cormorants (phalacrocorax carbo).