The Best Photography Tips for Bird-Watchers in 2022

Photography Tips for Bird

Birding has become a massively popular pastime and photography dovetails well with it. Here are our best tips for how to get great shots of our avian friends.

Photographing wild birds is a challenging pursuit. It presents even more hurdles than other wildlife photography: Not only are the birds able to fly away as soon as you’ve set up the perfect shot, but they’re often obscured by branches, twigs, and foliage, or silhouetted against a bright sky. But the challenge is part of the fun, and when you get that one magic shot out of the 400 you took, it’s all worthwhile.

The tips here are not for professional wildlife photographers who use equipment that easily costs north of 10 thousand dollars. They’re for the birder who goes on walks trying to see and document as many new species as they can. You’re in good hands, because I’ve made all the mistakes. I hope I can save you from falling victim to the many pitfalls I’ve suffered.

Just as important as any of the tips below is knowing that successful bird photography requires patience and dedication. You’ll often go out on a bird walk and have nothing to show. On other days, you’ll get home and find that you have shots of new bird species you didn’t even realize you saw while you were out there! For those of us who aren’t instant identifiers, having photos is a big help when compiling your list for the outing (and sending it to Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s wonderful eBird.

If you have tips of your own for better avian digital photography, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.

Use the Right Equipment

You need at least a 400mm (35mm equivalent) lens—with stabilization. You can use either a DSLR or a good superzoom model such as the Sony RX10 IV or Canon SX70 HS. A favorite bird lens of mine is the Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary, which gives you lots of reach, good stabilization, and fast ultrasonic focusing. For more options, read our roundups of the Best Bridge Cameras and the Best DSLR and Mirrorless Camera Lenses 

Shoot in Shutter Priority

Since you’re shooting a potentially moving subject with a telephoto lens, you’ll need to use a quick enough shutter speed to prevent motion blur, even though your lens includes stabilization. A rough rule of thumb is that you want at a very minimum a 1/100th of a second for still subjects. 1/320th of a second or higher will be more reliable, especially if the bird moves.

It’s not a hard and fast rule—with some practice, you may find longer shutter durations will get you better shots of birds in flight, with a bit of motion blur in the background.

Use Single-Point Focus, Spot Metering, and Auto ISO

If you use a lot of focus points, you’re just as likely to get a twig or branch near the bird in focus, rather than the bird itself. If you are photographing flight, you’ll want to set a three-by-three grid or more focus points to keep up with the moving subject. Since the bird may be against a very dark or very bright background, you don’t want an exposure mode that balances the whole image; you want the bird to be properly exposed, so use single-point spot metering for exposure.

Some bird photographers will dispute using Auto ISO, but my goal is to get the sharpest shot possible, with as little noise as possible. I’d love to be able to set ISO to the minimum (ISO 100 on my camera), but that’s not realistic for darker lighting situations. Auto ISO will always choose the lowest usable setting; one option is to set a maximum ISO of about 800, though I’ve run into conditions where I lost shots because the shutter wouldn’t snap because the light was too low.

Take Advantage of Exposure Compensation

This is a must for backlighting or other difficult lighting situations. Even with spot metering, you may find that a bright background throws off the metering and leaves you with a completely dark bird. Get used to spinning the EV compensation setting to, well, compensate for that.

Use Continuous Focus

On Canon gear, this is called AI Servo and with Nikon and Sony systems it’s called AF-C. With this mode, if the bird moves, the focus tracks it. If you shoot in single-shot focus (AF-S), the focus point locks once it’s been acquired, even for long bursts of shots, even if the bird moves. For best results, familiarize yourself with your camera’s focus system, since they vary by manufacturer.

Choose Raw File Format

Since you’re most likely going to need to adjust lighting, you’ll want all the data from your camera’s sensor. That’s what raw camera files offer, and when you shoot to this format, you’ll be able to recover a lot more information in dark areas of the image that you want to bring out with photo editing software.

Shoot in Burst Mode

This is one I’m still coming to grips with: I feel like part of the challenge of bird photography is to identify that moment when you’ll get the best shot and to press the shutter button exactly then. Nevertheless, photographing action at 5, 7, or even 10fps—depending on what your camera can manage—increases the chances of getting the best shot.

The setting is called Continuous shooting on some cameras. You’ll just have to spend a little more time culling images later, but you’re more likely to get an avian portrait in which your subject’s inner eyelid isn’t closed.

Check Your Settings

On more than one occasion, I’ve gone out and shot an hour or two worth of pictures, only to find later that I’d previously set the exposure to Manual for a much brighter subject, or to EV+3 for a dark subject. I’d get back home, load the SD card into my PC and find a card full of nearly black images or overexposed images.

Once I set ISO fixed at 800 and came back with a lot of noisy images. (Using a mirrorless camera, which shows you the actual exposure in the viewfinder, can prevent these situations.) A glance at my camera’s settings would have prevented these fiascos, had I not been so eager to just start shooting.

Make Sure the Bird’s Eye Is Sharp

With the telephoto lens you’ll be using, depth of field can be very narrow. In many of my shots, either the head or tail is in focus and the other blurry. If you get the eye in focus, your viewers will perceive it as a sharp shot. If the eye isn’t clear, the claws or tail can be tack sharp but your picture usually won’t be usable. Another eye-related tip is that a fun type of bird picture is when the bird is looking right at you, with the eyes alongside the head. These photos break the standard profile pose.

Ignore the Sunny Side

If I’m looking for a shot with good color and lighting, I’ll simply ignore the side of the trail where the light is coming from and concentrate on the well-lit side. If you think there’s a very special species and you just want to get a photo that’s good enough for identification, then of course you’ll want to take a picture no matter which side the bird is on. For an impressive, suitable-for-framing image, you usually want the light falling on the bird, rather than coming from behind it.

Photograph Interesting Behaviors

Sometimes you just want a standard, identifying, classic pose bird photo. You can add interest by getting an action shot, whether that be nesting, eating, fighting, or preening. Extra points for courtship displays! Interesting action can trump a perfectly focused and exposed shot, though having all of that is best.

Avoid Man-Made Objects

After all, this is wildlife photography, and anything that makes the bird seem domestic or captive takes the allure of that away. Of course, if you encounter a great species that’s on a fence or wire, go ahead and snap away. (Extra points if you can identify the species pictured here!

Use a Backpack

You definitely want a backpack for bird-walk photography, to free up your hands for shooting (or using binoculars) during your walk. Don’t just go out with the camera and nothing else. A sudden downpour might end your photo session, and a backpack with a camera case inside provides protection from excessive water.

You could go all out and buy a purpose-built camera bag, but I just use a good camera case inside a standard backpack with some clothing (a light rain jacket does double duty) for cushioning. A side tip here is to get a better strap than the one included with the camera; there are some suggestions in our Beyond-Basic Digital Photography Tips article. If you also carry binoculars (something I find unwieldy), there’s at least one camera-and-binocular strap(Opens in a new window) available.

Bring Extra Batteries

Make sure that the batteries your bring are charged the night before. When I was in South Taiwan, I missed some magnificent species because my battery died, and I didn’t have a backup. Don’t let it happen to you!

Bring Extra Memory Cards

Memory cards are the film of the digital photography age. Film could get spoiled with light leaks and memory cards have been known to fail or malfunction. I once had a card that only produced bands of color, rather than my photo. Just as film ran out after shooting a while, cards can get filled with images, preventing you from taking more. Have a couple extra formatted cards handy when you go out.

Use Photo Software

It’s miraculous when a bird photo looks perfect on your computer screen when you first load it from the card. It’s definitely an exception to the rule. At the very minimum, you’ll need to crop most bird shots using photo editing software, unless your subject was just a couple meters away. Lightroom is the go-to photo workflow and editing software, but sometimes if I’m in a rush, I simply use Windows’ included Photos app, which can handle raw files.

For most shots, you’ll also need to adjust the exposure and shadows, which the macOS and Windows Photos apps can do. To get the best results, however, you’ll want Lightroom, Capture One, or DxO PhotoLab, which excels at noise reduction.

Share Your Work

There’s a huge community of fine bird photographers on Flickr, which is where I share my best bird images. Yes, Instagram has a larger audience these days, but it has several drawbacks compared with Flickr. Instagram downsizes resolution to 1080 pixels, while Flickr keeps the full resolution.

And Instagram often forces you to suffer through memes and selfies. Flickr can show the camera’s EXIF information, which indicates camera and lens make and shot settings. Flickr also lets you include a map of where the shot was taken, which is extremely important for bird photography.

Another option is the Facebook Birders group, which gets wonderful bird shots, and the active How to Photograph Birds group. A truly excellent place to upload your photos is ebird.org(Opens in a new window). You may even get a photo published in a Cornell Ornithology book (as I did!), and contributing lists and photos to the project can aid ecological efforts.

Go Where the Birds Are

Yes, there are places in the US and Canada with some wonderful lists of bird species, but if you travel south a border or two, you’ll meet several entire new families of birds without a single representative species in the U.S. I’m talking about Motmots, Toucans, Tinamous, Cotingas, and Manakins (my personal faves) just to name a few. Even for the families of which we do have representatives, you’ll find a vastly richer variety in more tropical zones.

For example, in the Northeast US, we have but one hummingbird species (don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice bird), the Ruby-throated. The west and south have a handful more species. Head one country south, and in Mexico you can encounter 58 species of hummingbirds. Head to the country with the longest list of species, Colombia, and the tally goes up to 167 species, ranging from the Amethyst Woodstar to the Wire-crested Thorntail.

Hire a local guide if you can afford it. Otherwise you’re likely to miss three-quarters of the species you pass. As a side benefit, by visiting preserves in those countries, you’ll be supporting bird conservation and preservation where economic support is much needed. If you’re not up for the travel but want to see exotic species, you can always head to a local zoo or aviary, at least for some practice, but I feel like that takes the sport out of it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.