Photographing birds in flight is one of the most common things to want to achieve in wildlife photography, but it can be fiendishly difficult. Here I’ll go through some of my tried and trusted techniques to help you avoid some of the pitfalls.

Freemotion Support

In general, I find it best to try and avoid using a tripod if possible because this gives you freedom of movement in three dimensions. This may not be practical if you’re using a very large lens, but then using a very large lens with a long focal length can multiply the problem of tracking a bird in flight anyway. Consider the difference between the naked eye and a telescope: with the naked eye, it’s easy to watch and follow a bird in flight, even if it’s moving quickly and erratically.

Then imagine trying to keep this same bird in the much smaller field of view of a telescope. In reality, what happens is that the bird moves in and out of view as you struggle to follow its motion. Similarly, having to physically move a long (and probably heavy) lens around to keep up with a fast flying bird is pretty difficult, although it can be made easier by using a gimbal head like the Wimberley.

So, if you must use a tripod, try and make sure the head allows smooth, fast, free-flowing movements.

Flight mode

Ok, let’s have a think about camera settings. What you’re aiming to achieve here is a sharp shot of a fast moving bird and you need to give yourself every chance to capture this in the heat of the moment. Set your camera to continuous release mode (Nikon) / continuous shooting drive mode (Canon). This allows your camera to rapid-fire a sequence of shots in quick succession.

Then set the focus mode to continuous autofocus so that the camera adjusts focus continuously as long as you have your finger on the shutter button. On a Nikon camera, this is AF-C and on a Canon, it’s AI Servo. AI Focus is a Canon intermediate mode which is a bit like Marmite: you either love it or hate it. What this mode does is try to determine when you need single focus and when to switch to continuous focus. When I used to shoot Canon on the 5D I really didn’t like it, but if you’re a Canon aficionado, give it a go.

As for shutter speed and aperture, you’ll need enough speed to freeze the motion without running out of light. Increase the ISO if you haven’t got enough speed. I tend to use middling apertures for birds in flight to get enough depth of field to catch the head and part of the wings. That’s usually about f/8 to f/11.

Fine tuning

Modern DLSRs have a bewildering array of extra settings to help you get focus right in continuous mode. A couple of the more useful ones for our purposes are:

• the number of focus points;
• how long the camera tracks the subject.

These settings are often buried in a deep settings menu, but are sometimes more accessible. They’re well worth looking at.

When setting the number of focus points that the camera uses for autofocus, you’re likely to get different answers from different people. I personally prefer to use fewer focus points because it speeds up the autofocus system (it doesn’t have to do as much work) and it makes selecting the area of focus more accurate. This latter point is important because if you let the camera use all its focus points at once, how do you know it hasn’t locked onto the end of the wing instead of the eye of the bird? The eye is arguable the most important focus point on an animal because it creates a connection with us in the photograph. Usually, the image is weakened if the eye isn’t in focus, unless you have a good reason for focusing on a different part of the bird to draw attention to that.

I often set the number of focus points to a single point to get as much accuracy as possible, but when this is proving difficult to attain any kind of focus (you do have to be pretty accurate), I’ll usually go for 9 or 21 or something similar, which is a good compromise of area and speed.

How long the camera tracks the subject before it attempts to focus on something else is a good way of adjusting the camera’s response to the type of flight involved. Typically you have the option to set the length of time the autofocus system locks onto the part of the bird it thinks is in focus. Initially, you might expect it to be best to set this to as long as possible so that once you’ve locked focus, it’s best to keep that focus even if your quarry veers around the frame. The problem with this is that if you haven’t locked on to the correct part of the bird, the camera will keep this incorrect lock for a long time!

So, in practise, it’s best to keep the tracking time short, or even off altogether. This is rather an acquired taste and I’d advise you to experiment to see what suits you.

Pan handling

When birds fly across your field of view from one side to the other, the best way to follow this linear motion is to pan the action by swivelling your body at the hips. Grip the camera to your eye with your right hand while supporting underneath the lens with your left. Your left elbow should point downwards and you can tuck it into your chest to provide stability. This helps lock out some of the vertical vibrations and provides a solid position to pan with.

Follow the bird’s flight path and fire off a number of shots in continuous release mode. With any luck, one of these shots will be sharp.

Incoming!

Let’s take puffins as an example. One of the delights of the Farne Islands is that you’re inundated with puffins in flight. On the up side, this means that there are several opportunities to practise flight shots. On the down side it often means too much choice! Let’s stick with the up side. From experience, the best way to photograph puffins is to put the camera down for a few minutes and watch where they’re coming from first. They often forage in the same place (which can be tens of miles away) and will come back to the islands from the same direction. This direction depends presumably on factors like the wind and so on, but you can quite quickly determine where your quarry is likely to come from. There are usually two or three hotspots like this on each of the main islands at the Farnes.

The next obstacle to surmount (assuming you’ve found a reliable flight path) is to get your camera to track these little birds as they come in at speed. Many people say to me that, having never encountered a puffin before, they’re surprised at how small they are: sort of pint-sized. Less to aim at! In fact puffins are also deceptively fast: they appear on the horizon as a dot and seem to spend a long time to grow to puffin-sized missiles. It’s important to give your camera’s autofocus system as much time as possible to lock onto the flying puffin. Start tracking the bird as soon as you see it in the distance and keep your finger half pressed on the shutter button to continuously focus until the bird is a good size in the frame.

At this moment you’ve probably relaxed, assuming you’ve got the shot in the bag; at which point the bird appears to accelerate and change direction, zooming over your head. I’ve lost count of the number of times this has happened. The trick here is to try to anticipate what’s going to happen. Ok, each puffin is different and you’ll get more blurred shots than keepers, but persevere, and you’ll hopefully get one sharp. Practise indeed makes perfect.

Another thing about puffins: if they haven’t come in to land with their trademark sand-eels, it’s probably because they can see marauding gulls waiting for them. Fear not! They’ll usually do several circuits of the island and attempt a further landing, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the same bird to see if it comes round again. I once watched one for thirteen circuits before I lost sight of it!

Creative Blur

So far, I’ve been talking about taking sharp shots of birds in flight. Sometimes if the shot is too sharp though, it can freeze the motion so much that all sense of movement and action is lost. In this case, it’s worth thinking about lengthening the shutter speed a bit to allow some motion in the wings.

Exposure

To an extent, if there are dark areas on the underside of the bird you’re photographing, you can lift those shadows in post-processing, particularly if you’re shooting in RAW. However, there is a limit to this and if you try to lift shadows too much, you’ll end up with grainy, noisy areas in the photograph that look unnatural and soft. The best policy is to try to get exposure correct in camera (isn’t that always the way?) This can be tricky though, because you can end up fighting the sky for correct exposure. In general I’d recommend over-exposing a little with exposure compensation to bring up the shadows. But don’t do this so much that any of the bird over-exposes. You can’t recover blown highlights, even in RAW, so that’s your gauge for maximum over-exposure. The way to achieve this is by trial and error and examining your flashing highlights indicator and histogram. Switch these display options on (in your playback options) as they’ll indicate when you’ve gone too far with exposure. Just a tiny side-note about this is that I’ve noticed that my Nikon cameras are somewhat over-cautious with flashing highlights and small areas that are slightly over-exposed can indeed be recovered in post production when shooting RAW. That’s just my D4 and D800E though, so try it on your camera.

If you’re having problems with exposure, you could try adding a burst of flash to light up the underside of the bird. The requires the bird to be near enough for you to reach it of course, but it’s often a practical way of balancing out a strong back-light and under-exposed bird.

If ind doubt, always expose correctly for the bird at the risk of blowing the sky to bits. After all, it’s the wildlife you’re interested in, rather than the sky.

Negative space

In general, I like to put a bit of space on one side of a bird that is flying across my view from one side to the other. This is because it’s natural for the eye to want the bird to fly into space, rather than crash into the edge of the picture! This can go hand-in-hand with the old rule of thirds, whereby you position your subject on one of the cross points of an imaginary noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe) grid so that the bird is off centre.

Pre-focus

Sometimes it’s impossible to follow a bird in flight. Hummingbirds are a case in point. The best policy with awkward customers like this is to try to predict where they’re going to be and manually pre-focus your lens at that point.  Then it’s all down to timing the shot correctly when the bird comes into that sweet-spot.

Practise on gulls

You may not be particularly interested in gulls (I personally love them), but they’re ideal subjects to practise birds in flight shots. This is because their flight path tends to be more linear and smooth than a lot of the more erratic birds you’ll encounter. They tend to glide around relatively slowly, which makes them ideal to practise on.

Now over to you! Let me know how you get on and if I’ve missed anything that you’d like me to cover.

Practise on more interesting birds!

If you’ve enjoyed this article, but you’d like me to help you get the best out of your flight shots in person, why not come on a photo safari, where you’ll get plenty of opportunities to photograph amazing birds like eagles, rollers and vultures as well as the usual big 5.

It’s an uplifting experience to be heralded into the office by two duelling robins, each belting out a bright song from a nearby tree, with me receiving a glorious stereo mix in the middle.

It’s not robins I have in mind this morning though. I’ve spent a good part of the summer with swallows both here in the UK and in France. Their antics – and even simple presence – is uplifting all summer long.

Firstly I’ll give you some of the finished pictures and then throughout the text I’ll explain how I achieved the shots and show you some of the behind-the-scenes setup.

Swallow challenge 1: Northumberland

Outside my office in Northumberland, there are little-used barns: ideal nesting places for swallows. Not surprisingly, the full title of these little aerial gems is ‘barn swallows’ and I spent many a day in June photographing them, largely inside a dark space getting progressively covered in bird poo. My gear – and indeed I – have not quite been the same since.

As you’ll see, the technical challenges of photographing flying swallows is not insignificant!

First fledge

I chose two nests and started watching the behaviour of the parents as they sallied back and forth to fetch insects for the chicks. Each of the two nests contained four youngsters – quite a squash in the small mud cup nests when they’re ready to fledge. The pressure eventually gets too great and parents encourage the chicks to attempt a maiden flight by singing from nearby. I watched as, one by one, all four chicks from one nest tested their wings by flying to their parents on a nearby banister in one of the barns.

Making barn doors

Once the residents of nest 1 had scarpered, I concentrated on nest 2, which was just above the barn door. This barn door is about 2.5m high. When I say ‘door’, it’s really just an opening, as it doesn’t have a door at all. I could see the swallows flitting in and out and pirouetting in the air to land at the nest, so I had a go at photographing the incoming birds as they entered the doorway. With laughably poor results! The camera autofocus and my reactions couldn’t cope with such fast flying creatures and there was surprisingly little light just where I wanted to capture the birds, requiring serious amounts of ISO increase.

This called for some sort of ingenuity. Enter Mr. Heath Robinson!

I realised I had to slow the swallows down, so constructed a timber door frame with translucent under-floor foam to block the path of the birds but let light through. Then I cut a hole in the middle so I could control where they would fly in. Around about this time, I took delivery of a new camera trap trigger unit and thought that was just the ticket. After a few tests (with the help of my eldest daughter pretending to be a bird) I realised that there were a number of technical challenges, not least of which was the fact that the object had to be precisely where the trap needed, otherwise it wouldn’t trigger. I also noticed that the battery consumption was high and that if I wanted to leave the trap for hours or even days, I’d need some sort of battery pack. I tried various sizes and eventually plumped for a leisure battery, which is a caravan / motor home battery (a bit like a car battery) that is designed for continuous low power, rather than the intermittent high power that a car battery provides.

Rigging this up on a horizontal pole across the hole in the doorway I hoped it would trigger when the swallows entered. I had the trap linked to my camera on a tripod, which in turn controlled two or three wireless flashes. To cut a long story short, this kind of, sort of worked. A bit. But not well enough.

All change

In the end, I realised I was going to have to press the shutter myself, but that I was definitely getting somewhere by slowing the birds down in the first place. Exchanging the translucent foam for black photo background paper, I re-made the door for a different look. This time, I wanted to cut out all stray light and let the flashes do all, or most of the work. Instead of using the trap, I stood behind the door on the inside of the barn with the camera pointing out of the hole. With wireless flashes on the outside of the hole and manual exposure and focus, I eventually got the shots I was after. Well, almost. There’s always room for improvement and the door is now stowed away ready for next year’s swallow broods.

Quick as a flash

One of the technical aspects I hadn’t banked on having to solve was flash duration. As I’ve mentioned, I wanted the flashes to do all the work, so I had to rely on the flash duration to expose the image. This means deliberately using settings on the camera that underexpose the scene so that the flash is the sole source of illumination. The problem here is that there are flashes and flashes! I tried my studio flash heads, but the flash duration was too long. Even on lowest power, the heads’ flash was on for too long so that the effective shutter speed didn’t freeze the motion of the birds. I’ve since found out that there is a way to do this by using the PocketWizard Flex TT5 and TT1 wireless control units to shorten the duration on these heads, so I’ll have to try that some time. However, I did use these wireless units to trigger three speedlights on various lighting stands. Honestly, the place looked like a shiny forest at times!

Speedlights have the advantage that, particularly on low power, their flash duration is extremely short. We’re talking 1/38,500 sec on minimum power for a Nikon SB900. That’s fast enough to freeze almost anything! In the end, I used more power and a longer flash duration than this, but the effects were what I’d been looking for.

Ethics

I should mention at this point that stress to the nesting birds was kept to a minimum. At all stages, I was aware of any heightened agitation and backed off if that was the case.

Swallows are actually pretty forgiving little things and adapt to their environment readily and quickly. For example, when I built the door, it only took them a few minutes to work out how to fly through the hole and they certainly weren’t bothered as long as they could get a clear path to their young. They would land on the lip of the hole or fly in front of it to check that there were no surprises behind and then through they would shoot. I left the door in place, rather than removing it at night and they regarded it as simply part of their home.

I suppose this is no different to a small window opening or a hole in the eaves.

Lastly, the amount of light wasn’t altered much as there were windows upstairs in the barn, too.

Both sets of four chicks fledged successfully and are still buzzing around the skies as I type.

Swallow challenge 2:
Loire Valley

One thing that didn’t occur to me when heading to France on holiday this year was that more than a hundred swallows would routinely use our swimming pool to drink from. They’d line up on the telephone wires in chatty ranks and one by one come swooping down in a precise dive to snatch water from the surface.

Almost fearless, one came within a metre of me while swimming. It must be thirsty work eating flies all day. Yum.

Focus guesswork

As you might imagine, I felt compelled to get a photograph of this, although I again came up against the technical difficulties of predicting where a fast flying swallow is likely to be and taking a photo at the exact moment it opens its mouth for a gulp of water.

Lift off

The wind direction altered which side of the pool the birds would fly from as they seemed to prefer diving into the wind, presumably so they could get immediate lift once they’d taken a drink. I imagined what might happen to an unlucky bird that got the timing wrong: I don’t think it would be able to take off from the water, so would probably not survive.

Manual everything

Again, using manual exposure and focus I cranked the ISO up to achieve very fast shutter speeds and clicked away with a fast frame rate.

Trial and error eventually got some results that I’m fairly happy with.

Until next year

Back in England, I’ll be very sad to see these little fellows fly off to Africa soon. The skies will seem a lot less cheery without their playful frolicking and scratchy twittery songs. I’ll just have to come back and look at the pictures I’ve taken every once in a while over winter and wait for their return early next summer.

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K