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Birds in Flight

Virgin flight flight makes Burt's unique for bird photographers and makes it uniquely challenging and ultimately, uniquely rewarding. Right. There is nothing like coming home with an image of a bird in flight, and you feel so accomplished. You feel so excited that you are actually able to capture that now. I started photographing Burton flight long before there were cameras with autofocus lenses, and I'll share this image with you. This is a landing albatross on a lonely little island off Hawaii. This image took me a week. It took me a week to figure out the circumstances under which I could anticipate albatrosses landing. Of course, they will land into the wind and but no autofocus on the lens. So imagine a bird flying at you, and you had to manually intersect yourself with the bird approaching you at 30 miles an hour. So there were not many frames that survived from that experiment, so but one is all it takes, right? So I just wanted to share that with you because for those of you wh...

o started photographing, But all these wonderful new tools auto everything, it's almost incomprehensible to think back of how you can do that manually. So these days, capturing an albatross and flight perfectly sharp. Even when it's coming straight at you and you're standing on the moving boat that does this, I won't say it's a piece of cake, but the opportunities are so much greater now than they used to be. So let's talk about Birch in flight. We're gonna look at flocks of snow geese in the next video as they come wheeling around. And how do you intersect yourself it that how do you make choices when you see a flock approach? What I like to do is I like to study the patterns before I put the camera in front of my eye. Because if you got 1000 birds who are all going toe, lend in the same place, you have some opportunities to study the patterns. And very you can best intersect yourself with the movement of the birds and you start paying attention to light. You know what is the best way to see them in this case? I really like that light coming at the birds and creating a highlight on the front end of their wings, and there's a little bit of shading under damn. And I start looking for the patterns. Of course, birds always like toe land into the light into the wind. So you want to try and be up, wind from very anticipate them landing. And then I start looking for individual patterns on the landing flaps come out that's universal in waterfowl and in sea birds as well. And that really shows you that the bird is cleared for landing. And this is, I think, in my opinion, a perfect example of how our snow goose likes the Lent. It's perfectly in control of its own body, and it looks graceful, but then this is not looking quite as graceful, but this gives you a different perspective on the same kind of birth. Yet geese are actually kind of chunky, and they're heavily body birds. They need to fly fairly rapidly and on Lee at the last moment that they begin to Beck paddle, and that is when they come straight down. And I was interested in capturing some of that flight action as well. And you see, this movement in the wings is actually kind of interesting. Now we're gonna look at the video, but before I do that. I just want to assert again that the modern sensors in our cameras you have a lot of possibilities to give you some extra margin. The old rule of thumb for birds and flight used to be. Keep your shutter speed at 1 500 of a second or 1000 if you can. But these days I say move it to 3000 of a second and give yourself an extra margin but your depth of field as well, Because as these birds come towards you, your lens may not be totally tack sharp on their you want it to be so. In this case, my settings were 1 of a second at F 11. So margin vit the shutter speed in a margin with my depth of field. Let's see, but what we encountered when we were looking at birth and flight in Colusa, we went to a spot for snow geese for gathering, and we were on our viewing platform that gave us a nice overlook. I showed how the wind direction you creates a predictable pattern of how the birds come in because they always like toe land into the wind. And as it turns out, that also meant that the sun was behind us. So that illuminated the birds very nicely against that blue sky. So we chose a setting that gave us a high shutter speed more than 1000 of a second. In fact, we went up to 1 2000 of a second so that every frame is tack sharp. And because there was so much light, we were also able to increase our depth of field. We chose a very small aperture of F 16 and F 22 the I S O was floating along with shutter speed and the aperture because we were all in auto ISO settings and then it was just a matter of working with the birds. Of course, not every frame turns out the way you want it to be, but with a high burst rate, whenever there was a nice flock approaching, we would get not just five frames, but 10 to 20 frames. And in the end, I'm very happy to see that somebody's frames show the birds nicely spaced nice wing patterns. I'm really excited to see what we ended up. Let's optimize the settings for Birch and flight. We're applying auto I s O. And now we're going to dial in a shutter speed off 2000 2002 thousands fast enough. And that gives me a lot of room for decreasing my aperture. Making its making it smaller than these are higher f stop and them dialing in f 16. And that brings my I s O to about 2000 which is well, but in the range of capturing a really high quality image. And it gives us a lot of margin. Both go for capturing the Burt Crisp, because the shutter speed is fast and we have an increased depth of field. So if the birds are not all in the same plane for still gonna have them sharp. So now we all we have to do is wait for them to come. So, you know, if there are king around like that, I like it when they're facing into the sun. And then the other moment is in the beginning to kind of backpedal. Ready for landing. Okay, you come the 1st A couple more. Here's a formation. Yes. Say this is not too bad, but it's really just the beginning that settings are good. You know, nothing is over exposed in the snow Goose. Take a look at yours. That looks good. Is just the wing position isn't so great yet. But you can't. You can't predict that. I think we're doing well. We just need more birch. Okay. Right. Okay. Come on. Nice. You know, let's take a look. Nice. Nice. We can crop that in that TV. See, that is that is nice and clean. I like, Yeah, Sharp tech, Sharman. All right. So, um, perhaps before we handed over to you in the studio and two people in the chat room, I'd like to show some more examples of how I work with Birch in flight, and then we'll we'll give it back to you. Well, so that was a very specific situation in this wildlife refuge. We were standing in one spot than the birds were gathering in front of us on the water. So there were plenty of opportunities to figure out the patterns of how the birds moved in. Any intersect yourselves going to show you another example. I was in Brazil. I was leading a photo to every had a small group with us of six people, and we went to this sinkhole there. McCall's like to gather. It's a big hole in the ground viewing platform set up, and, ah, there was a challenge. It's your in the tropics, the lights gonna harsh its way overhead and the background looks like this. It's very harsh, and you've already learned for me how I think about the backgrounds as much as I think about the subject. So McCall's air great to see. But it doesn't really work for me. And, you know, in most of the range of our these birds were flying through, the backgrounds were not that interesting, and I was really limiting most of my flight shops, but a couple of specific angles. This is smooth enough, and this was also very nice. So the backgrounds determined where I wanted to any my camera, and then sometimes the birds would dive deep into the sinkhole, where delighted it's much darker and that was actually perfect. See, the bird is illuminated from above and there's no distracting background. So look for your background before your aim, your camera at a bird in flight. Now that those snow geese in flight. There was no problem because they're reeling around in a blue sky. So you're always good to go now. Here's another example. Seibert. Ah, this is a giant petrel photographed from a moving ship. The birds are going back and forth behind the ship. There, like albatrosses, she other quartering back and forth, looking for any food that is churned up by the boat. Is it dis moving along? It gives you a lot of opportunities to photograph them in flight. But the background again is a little bit disturbed because you have the wake of the ship, and in this instance I experimented with a relatively slow shutter speed. I was tracking along with the patrol as it was moving past and with a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second. If you can track the bird effectively, the background will blew out. So instead of seeing the details of all the waves, it's becoming very smooth. And here I did something similar with an albatross in flight. But in this case of a sitting on the shoreline and there were albatrosses coming by periodically of is doing the same thing. I recall my shutter speed here was 1 25th of a second. So it's a slow shutter speed sufficient to blur out the background as I'm moving with the bird. But I want to keep the bird sharp. More birds in flight. Hummingbirds, ello, coming birds. I'm really happy to live in California, where we have so many of them. But this hummingbird I photographed in Argentina in the in the garden of a lady who loves hummingbirds to, and she invites people to come and photograph them there. And there were certain flowers in bloom. And, of course, those become the magnets. And I set myself up with my camera on the tripod, and I had a flash Phil because I wanted to add a little bit of a touch of light eso justice with these other situations that took some time to figure out the patterns, how the birds were coming in going, and then I had to determine the right settings. Now, when you using Flash Phil yo, the strobe determines the cut off off your fastest shutter speed, it cannot go beyond 250th of a second on. That means that the wings of the hummingbirds are getting blurred because they're moving so fast. But that actually adds a nice little bit of a creative touch. And then the setting for the aperture was governed by the need to keep the eye eso at a manageable level and not to show too much detail in the background. So my opportunity said it F eight. So those are the reasons have been into the particular settings. And then it was just a matter of waiting for hummingbirds to come and only had from a morning session. I had two or three frames that I felt really good about. But that's all you need, right? So then the last example on back to seabirds Storm petrels are abundant on the open oceans of the world. Yeah, there are millions and millions of them, but we're not that familiar with them because they never comma lent. So you really need to be a researcher or you need to be a sailor on a mission from one continent to the other before you see many of them but the Verena Galapagos during one of our photo tours. And I hope some of you will join us on the next tour there of and we saw the storm patrols. The ship had released some things from the kitchen from the galley on board some oils that came from the food preparation. And that is what attracted the storm petrels and never coming closer and closer. And after a while they were coming right down right to the edge of the ship. And I ran up to the highest stick and I was looking straight down on them. And then using ah, hyper fast shutter speed of 1 4/ of a second in combination with an extended depth of field enabled me to make thes two unusual images off a storm patrol, which I've never been able to do like that before.