Watching, waiting…
Kingfisher Airlines
We’ve all seen dramatic images of a kingfisher or bird of prey grabbing a fish while flying across a river or lake, but how do you get those shots? Bird in flight photography is hard enough without having to worry about the fish, too!
With that in mind, here’s my cut-out-and-keep guide to capturing the crucial moment. I took all these shots in the wild, but feel free to book a few hours or a weekend at a local hide.
Some photographers look down on this as you end up with exactly the same images as everyone else who was there, but that’s true in a way of all wildlife photography. You’re almost never completely alone, and I see nothing wrong with making life easy for yourself!
Just make sure you’re not ‘under-glassed’. Birds are often small and skittish, so you often need the equivalent of at least a 600mm lens to be sure of filling the frame.
It also helps to have a decent mirrorless camera. I traded in my old Nikon D810 and D850 for a pair of Sony a1 cameras, and it helps enormously to have a WYSIWYG viewfinder, a maximum shutter speed of 1/32000 of a second, a 30 fps frame rate and bird eye detection and tracking!
The Perch
A Watchful Eye
The first step to taking pictures of birds is usually just a portrait. This is the easiest option, and you can sometimes get some dramatic images—like this one of an Indian roller in Bandhavgarh National Park.
I was with Paul Goldstein, a wildlife photographer who can’t see the point of taking pictures of birds if they’re just sitting on a branch doing nothing in particular! However, it takes all sorts, and it’s nice to ease yourself in gently sometimes…
There aren’t any particular settings to use for portraits. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. However, most wildlife photographers shoot wide open to isolate the subject against the background, and it’s wise to choose a ‘default’ shutter speed of at least 1/1000 of a second to avoid motion blur.
If you’re shooting in low light and the bird lingers for a few seconds, you can trade off a high shutter speed for a lower ISO. It’s a numbers game, though, so you need to take more and more shots at lower shutter speeds to make sure you get at least one that’s sharp!
When you’re editing your images afterwards, just sort them by capture time in reverse order and look for the first sharp image. That’ll be the one with the lowest ISO and therefore the best image quality in terms of noise, colour rendition and contrast.
Advantages
You usually have time to check your settings and experiment with shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation.
Focusing is much easier.
It’s easier to get a catchlight in the bird’s eye to ‘bring it to life’.
You can usually wait for the best possible pose.
Disadvantages
This isn’t an action shot, so there’s no energy or sense of movement!
The Dive
White-throated kingfisher
If you focus on the bird on the branch, you can sometimes manage to get a few frames of it diving towards the water. This takes good reactions, and you might need to guess when smaller birds are going to take off.
It also helps to set your camera up with all the right autofocus settings, including bird eye detection and tracking. This is where mirrorless cameras such as my Sony a1 and the Nikon Z9 and Canon R3 or R5 score so highly. The AF system won’t necessarily keep the eye in focus the whole time, but the first few frames should be fine.
Ideally, you should shoot wide open with a high shutter speed such as 1/3200 of a second to freeze the action. Small birds move very fast, and their wings move even faster!
If there’s enough light, you can always narrow the aperture to f/11 or even f/16 to give yourself a margin for error.
Advantages
This is an action shot, so it should be more dramatic than any portrait you might take.
There’s no spray to confuse the AF system before the bird hits the water.
Disadvantages
This is still not what you really want, which is the bird flying away from the water with a fish in its mouth!
The Catch
My Tern to Fish
If you want the ‘money shot’, then you need to use a different technique. Paul Goldstein’s recommendation is to focus on the water where the bird last tried to catch a fish, watch that spot with your naked eye (rather than through the EVF) and hit the shutter button to take a burst of shots when the bird hits the water.
Paul also suggests using the wide area focus zone covering the whole frame (if you have a mirrorless camera), hoping that the camera will pick up the bird in flight. However, you can also lock the autofocus to make sure the AF system doesn’t get ‘distracted’. This is easier with back button focus as you can simply lift your thumb off the AF-ON button.
Again, you need a high shutter speed for this type of shot, and an aperture of f/8 or f/9 will give you a bit of ‘wiggle room’ if the bird doesn’t arrive exactly where you expect.
If you’re shooting backlit, you might want to underexpose by a stop or so, but it’s up to you.
Advantages
If you get the shot you want, it’s job done! There are few better bird-in-flight shots than those showing a bird exploding out of the water with a fish in its mouth.
Disadvantages
You don’t know where the bird will hit the water.
The timing is tricky as everything happens so fast—which might mean hundreds of wasted frames if you’re shooting at 30 fps!
You won’t get many chances to get it right.
The bird might not catch anything!
Verdict
I’m a great believer in being ambitious with your photography. If you only aim to get good shots, the chances are that you’ll only get good shots—not great ones. Yes, this kind of shot is hard to pull off, but you could say the same of virtually anything else in life that’s truly worthwhile and exceptional.
All I can do is wish you luck…!
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