Bird photography !!!

There are a lot of things which make bird photography very interesting, apart from studying the birds with all the scientific names an all.

Firstly most of the birds are very shy. They will run away from you if you distract them or pose danger. So it is necessary to be quiet and calm in your shooting.

Also one needs to understand when and where a particular bird can be found. What is the period of migration, what is the period of nesting etc. Patience is the key factor necessary for bird photography.

A lot of times i have spent hours running after or wating for a bird, and still i dint get any shot. Sometimes when you do get a shot, the background is of the same colour, the bird is sitting in the opposite direction, the light is not enough, you dont have a faster lens, or there is just not enough reach in terms of focal length.

Light is a big problem in 2 ways.

1. A lot of small birds like to hide in trees, under shadows, where the light is very low.

2. When you are shooting a flying bird, you need faster shutter speeds. To do so ... you need light.

Lets talk about focal length now.

There are a number of zoom lenses around in the range of 70-300mm from almost all manufacturers like Olympus, canon , nikon , sigma. These give good enough reach to start off with bird photography. But the quality of these zooms is not great. Also at their longer ends they are very slow. Also my experience tells me any lens in this range should be used 1-2 stops slower to get the sharpest quality. If you do this you get even slower shutter speed.

Now if you say you want fast and long primes. Well you will definitely get these. But then you might as well go an buy A car instead of that money. 600 f4 or 400 f2.8 are erally really costly.

What I have done to counter this is as follows. I bought an olympus E500. This camera gives me a 2x factor for every lens. That means a 100mm lens will give me an image as big as a 200mm on 35mm camera. I will explain this concept in my later writings. I also took a 40-150 lens which gives me a focal length of 80-300mm on a 35mm camera. This is a very fine lens, and its a bargain for the price. I also bought a used 300mm f4.5 OM Zuiko lens for about 10k. This is can be used on any olympus camera with an adapter. This is a moderately fast prime lens and it gives me a focal length of about 600mm at f4.5.

But after you spend a lot of money , a lot of time, and a lot of efforts and then when you get one good shot, do let me know how happy you are.