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.

Ever since I can remember, the RAW vs JPEG debate has rumbled on. It tends to prompt black or white opinions despite the answer not being as clear cut as you might think.

In fact there are good reasons for using both formats in different circumstances, depending on what and how you’re photographing.

I’ve been teaching photography workshops and running photography safaris for several years now and I still find it useful to talk to people about the pros and cons behind each format. When you buy a camera, more often than not its factory default settings will have you shooting JPEG. I’ll discuss here when that’s a good idea and when you need to switch to RAW. Or indeed when to plump for both together.

The Raw Truth

RAW is the format your camera stores its native information in. So when you press the shutter button, this is the raw information that the camera saves; the whole photo in all its glory. Some examples of RAW file extensions (when you look at them on a computer) are .NEF (Nikon), .CR2 (Canon), .SR2 (Sony) and .ORF (Olympus).

The principal reasons for shooting in RAW are quality and flexibility. RAW files keep the highest amount of information that your camera’s sensor records, which allows you to process that into meaningful images later in RAW processing software such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, DxO Optics, Capture One etc. These RAW processors allow you to interpret the image file the way you want it whilst retaining maximum detail, colour and dynamic range. Once you’re happy with the processing, you can then export the image as a JPEG, TIFF or other image file for printing, sharing or web upload.

Having all the image data to hand gives you more flexibility when working with the photo on the computer. This means you can alter the image (exposure, colour, shadow detail, highlights, sharpness, etc.) to a greater extent than you could if you shot in JPEG.

Almost Perfect, But…

So, we’ll just shoot in RAW all the time then, eh? Well, let’s consider JPEG format for a minute. What we are actually doing when shooting JPEGs is asking the camera to throw away some of the raw information. Surely that’s just daft. Why would you want to throw away any of your lovely photograph?

Well, in many cases, raw files can be very large indeed. They take up a lot of room on your SD / compact flash card. Not only that, but the sheer processing required to move this amount of data around inside your camera can slow it down considerably.

Where this really comes to the fore is when you need to shoot a whole sequence of images in quick succession. This can produce a phenomenon known as buffer lock-up where the camera refuses to take any more pictures until it has finished writing all of the image data from its internal temporary store (the buffer) to the data card. This can vary considerably between different cameras.

At best this can be an inconvenient hiatus as the camera stops you from taking any more photos for a second or two. At worst, the camera may completely lock you out for tens of seconds while it shuffles all the data off to the card. By this point the critical action will have passed.

Have a look at this demonstration between a fast camera (Nikon D4) and a much slower one (Nikon D800E) taking continuous RAW files:

These are both professional cameras, but you can see that the D800E is not really deigned for speed. The clear advantage that the D4 has over the D800E is that it can shoot a huge number of full sized RAW files in very quick succession without the buffer locking up. And when it does eventually lock up, it still allows a reasonable frame rate. In practical terms, this means the D4 is ideal for shooting fast sequences of action, whether that’s a bird in flight or a speedway bike crashing. In both situations you want to maximise the possibility of getting one sharp frame of the action.

When to Shoot JPEG

As I mentioned above, JPEG format throws away some of the image data immediately after the RAW file is produced by the camera. The advantage of this is that the RAW file is then discarded and only the JPEG is stored. Card storage space isn’t really an issue these days, but the smaller JPEG files are easier for the camera to move to the card and it can therefore operate faster and for longer before lock-up happens. For out-and-out speed, you can rarely beat JPEG.

Indeed the first time I picked up my D4 (set to factory JPEG), it filled an entire 16GB card with images. It didn’t pause once. That’s an extraordinary feat. This isn’t an advert for Nikon’s flagship cameras though: you may well find that shooting JPEGs allows you to capture the all important image that you’d have otherwise missed during lock-up. The trade-off is that the resulting images aren’t as high quality as the RAW files. But the point is that you got the shot; for action photography, that’s critical.

Be careful though. If you decide to shoot JPEGs, you must set up all the camera’s picture settings (white balance, contrast, sharpness and so on) correctly before you press the shutter button. Similarly, you’ll need to get the right exposure in camera by using the correct shutter speed, aperture and ISO because you’ll have less leeway when processing these JPEGs later. Once the camera takes the shot, the JPEG compression throws away some of the data and it’s gone forever.

There is another advantage of JPEG shooting. If you’re not so sure about all the effort that goes into RAW processing and don’t really have the time, JPEG is definitely worth considering. The idea behind shooting in this mode is to get the shot right in the camera straight away and not to have to process later on the computer. This is perfectly valid, as long as you’re aware that you’re not storing the highest quality files that the camera produces.

I know from experience that a lot of people starting out in photography don’t want to spend much time in front of a computer. I feel your pain! If you just want to get out there and take shots, without worrying about much computer work, then by all means, shoot JPEG.

Photo-journalists and sports photographers may opt for JPEG if they need to take and transmit images to their picture desks electronically almost in real time. In this case, these smaller JPEGs will be immediately available for transmission, whereas the much larger RAW files would take too long to send and require processing at the other end.

Best of Both

If you’re not sure which format to choose – and out-and-out speed isn’t absolutely essential, why not switch your camera to use both these formats at the same time? Most cameras have the option to hedge your bets by storing both the RAW and JPEG versions of the file. More space is taken up on the card and there’s no speed advantage, but the ability to use an instant JPEG and come back to process the RAW file later could be enough to persuade you to at least store the RAW file. Even if you don’t look at it for years!

In fact, RAW processing software improves all the time and it’s not unusual to want to come back and re-process an image with new or different software to get that little bit more out of the original image.

It’s Complicated

As a postscript, I thought I’d mentioned a couple of other periphery, but interesting options. To complicate matters, there are different types of RAW file. Some cameras offer the option to compress the files. If you do choose to shoot a compressed RAW format, I’d recommend you only use the lossless versions. In this case, the RAW file is compressed in size in a way that doesn’t lose any of the detail – much like a zip archive is made on a computer.

Some cameras have a setting that allows you to select the bit depth. For example, you may be able to choose between 12 and 14 bit RAW files. The 14 bit files will store four times as much information, which leads to smoother tonal and colour transitions and better dynamic range. Some photographers claim they can’t tell the difference between 12 and 14 bit and selecting the smaller file speeds the camera up. I haven’t tried this as I always want the highest quality possible, but it could be an option for you.

Why not put it all into practise and come on a wildlife photo safari with me?

Kaleel