Photography

Digital technology has revolutionised bird photography. With all the camera gear that's now available, almost anyone can take great bird photos at a very affordable cost.  The best thing about digital photography is that you can take as many photos as you like and you can see the results instantly - so if you've not good a good shot, you just take some more.

Before I get on to camera equipment, I just want to say that the two most important things for taking a pleasing bird photograph are good light and getting close to the subject. Getting close is all part of what birders call 'fieldcraft' which includes knowing the subject and how it behaves, approaching slowly and low down if possible, hiding your outline against a tree or a fence, not approaching directly or making eye contact, not making any sudden movements or noises and generally respecting the bird's space and safety.

Composition (the placement of the subject in the frame in relation to the habitat and background) is no longer as important as it used to be because nearly every bird photograph will be cropped using a computer program to some degree, and possibly also digitally enhanced to improve exposure, colour and sharpness.

For a beginner or those with a casual interest in photography, the most suitable camera for taking bird photographs nowadays is the so-called 'bridge' camera. This is a camera which lies in between the simple 'point and shoot' compact cameras and the more professional DSLR cameras.  Apart from being quite small and very portable, the most powerful feature of a bridge camera lies in its zoom lens which allows you to get close to the subject - a 60x magnification is fairly standard on these cameras and this is a lot more than most of the enormous lenses you will have seen on DSLR cameras.

However, bridge cameras have both optical and digital zoom sizes and it is important to realise that a large optical zoom is more desirable than a large digital value for better quality photographs. Bridge cameras also have many of the features of DLSR cameras including setting the ISO speed, aperture size and shutter speed and these all give you control over how the photograph will appear.

Although bridge cameras are great value and can produce excellent results, they still don't quite match up to the quality of photograph produced by a DSLR camera system (although who knows what will happen in the future as the quality improves?).  A good basic DSLR camera with a zoom lens of 300mm or more maximum focal length will produce great results for birds at feeding stations or close to you. Any modern DLSR camera will allow you to take excellent bird photographs - the number of megapixels is often used to indicate the quality of the images that can be produced, but anything from 16 to 24 megapixels is sufficient. But the most important feature of a DSLR camera system is the lens.

Zoom lenses are very flexible because they allow you to change your viewpoint or what you see in the viewfinder without having to physically move.  They also allow you to take habitat shots and landscapes as well as close up bird shots.

As affordable and good as they are, zoom lenses still leave a lot of photographers wanting more and the holy grail of birding lenses is the 'prime' lens.  This type of lens has a fixed focal length, e.g. 300mm and it cannot be changed, so to get a different viewpoint you have to change position.  But the quality of the photographs produced by a prime lens is much better than most zoom lens and the focal length can usually be increased by using teleconverters or extenders with usually little loss in image quality. A teleconverter increases the focal length of a lens by 1.4x, 1.7x and 2x the magnification value effectively turning the lens into a longer lens and hence making the subject of the photograph larger in the image.

Here is a table to show the increase in focal length produced by adding each type of teleconverter: