Great place to start photographing wild birds is at the Sea Bird Colony, Britain’s got some really significant important sea Bird Colonies and that’s you can see here, very approachable, you don’t need hides, you don’t need big lenses, it’s just a gift for innate photographers.
Well common mistakes people make there is because they are ever faced with so many fantastic opportunities on one day just trying to do everything all at once when really what you need to do is probably concentrate on one species and we’re going to try and concentrate on Puffins today.
So let’s talk about equipment for Sea Bird Photography, as we’re seeing is it’s not particularly a problem getting close to subjects so you don’t really need a massive telephoto, anything up to 400mm easy big enough and quite a lot shorter than that is often adequate, I actually prefer using a 70-200mm most of the time, it’s much more portable and responsive. We’ll tell you it’s a good idea to have something quite close focus here in your bag for those headshots and I like to have a tripod with me for the longer lens and I’ll pack it all in something like Dry Zone bag, this is waterproof, not just because it’s a rainy day but also in about for the landing especially if it’s an inflatable risk of getting swamped to sea water than you really need some group protection for your equipments. Sea birds are well adapted to life at sea and that they really like coming ashore that’s all going to do so because they have to breathe and lay eggs. And they’re around form May to June until the early part of July and that’s about the only time you’ll catch them on land. If you want to photograph them in flowers, Puffins and Drift, or Bluebells and May is the time, if you want to get them carrying sand hills and some feeding the young then end of June is a good time, but don’t leave it past second week of July, cause they’ll all have gone out to sea again.
Typically I’ve been using quite a wide aperture on my lens to try and act too late the subject from the background looking for clean background of sea or flowering pinks or something .Shoot to speed not particularly critical for perching birds but if you’re looking for flights, shots of Puffins or (--) and it won’t be something better than 1/1000th of a second, maybe towards 1/2000th if ever.
Spacey can be quite tricky with black and white seabirds especially in strong sunlight, watch out for blown highlights on white plumage, check your histogram regularly, you may find the need to under expose quite substantially, maybe minus 1 1/3 stop, that order. With birds like (--) racing bird in particular, black heads and black eyes, you’ve got to look for that turn of the head and the glimpse or a catch light in the eye to bring it into life otherwise it will all be blacked out.
And we’re in the best of weather today, that we’ve best to get some shots and I’ll be quite interested to see what they look like and they’ll compete a bit later.
As it turned out we’re quite lucky to get to the island that’s all like that where they really closed in, but we’re still able to get quite a good few photographs in spite of the wind and the blustery showers, so all the face to that is very simple portrait of the Puffin but it does really zing out against that green foliage in the background and I’ve made it so because I’ve used to wide aperture differential focus so that it does stand out well. And the icing on the cake is the fact that the bird’s yawning with its bill open and that just brings it to life. Here’s another shot with the bird in portrait format and I’ve anticipated the fact that it’s going to raise its wings, you can often see from the bird when it’s been preening that after that after a period it’s going to flap its wings, and the trick here is to leave enough space around so that when the bird does raise its wings and flap, that you not clipping them off. In some ways I’ve been also used to windy conditions to my advantage because it helps the birds stall as they come in to land. On this shot, I’m getting 1/500th of a second ft.8, this is on the 70-200mm same lens, that helps improve my autofocus speed and I’ve got 1/500th of a second which is enough to stop movements on the head and, but you can see this is still quite a blur in the wing that’s which I find quite pleasing in this case because it does still imply a sense of movement. And there were few birds coming in with sand hills to feed their young, but you have to be pretty quick off the mark because they’re really swift in diving down their boroughs trying to avoid predators like Gulls, this one practically ran off my feet to get through his borough. Even from this small portfolio of images you can see that seabirds involve themselves in all kinds of interesting behavioral activities and there’s lots of opportunities there for fabulous photographs not just straightforward portraits.
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