Photographing birds is a challenge and when you add movement it make capturing a bird in flight more complex. To be successful you really need to know your camera so when an opportunity appears you can take advantage of it. I was walking along the Santa Cruz, CA coastline at Baldwin Creek. In this section, there are 100 to 150 ft cliffs and inland there is a lake about 100 ft below the bluffs. This Snow Goose was flying south toward me and I was able to capture the guy at eye level. Larger birds move more predictably so they are easier to photograph while in motion.
It was a good year, at least for photographing bird, and there were many rare migrants this spring (see my 2020 Northern Nevada Rare Spring Migrants post). One of my 2020 favorites was this Hutton’s Vireo that showed up during the Truckee Meadows CBC in Reno.
There are many ways to photograph birds and in this post I will share with you how I do it. Photographing birds is arguably the most difficult and at times the most frustrating photographic endeavor that requires patients and perseverance. Birds are always on the move, especially Warblers, but they also move into and out of extreme lighting conditions.
When I was living the the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, one of my yard birds were Acorn Woodpeckers. They are very social and collectively they search for acorns and use a tree to store them for the winter. The male below was right off my deck so I was able to get very close but he was in the shade and with a shutter speed of 1/1000s and an aperture of f/4.8 I needed to use an ISO1600, which is a little higher than I like but it was below my upper limit ISO2000 for the D800.
This year was great for rare spring migrants passing through the Reno Nevada area. The birds in this blog I had photographed all less than an hour from my home below Mt Rose SW of Reno, Nevada. I used the ebird.org database to establish how rare the birds where based on the number of reports over the last 20 years.
