Birds in Motion

A couple of weekends ago my father-in-law showed me his new bridge camera. Although I can see the point of them for someone who likes to take pictures but isn’t all that interested in the finer workings of a camera, I think most people who are used to the quality and flexibility of a true digital SLR would quickly become frustrated with one (the model my father in law showed me also gets very, very noisy at high ISO levels, to the point that I’m not really sure why they bothered to allow such sensitivity).

Still, the results my father-in-law has achieved with it are pretty good. One of the shots he was quite pleased with was one in which some seagulls had been captured static in flight as they fought for some bread.

Flash forward a week, and my wife and I were sitting on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham enjoying a lovely warm spring day, albeit in what I believe was technically still winter.

Surrounding us were birds of many shapes and sizes (within reason, of course; they were all still bird-shaped and sized), fighting beak and claw for some of the bread that the inhabitants of my corner of London now felt brave enough to go outside and feed to them. Inspired by the shot my father-in-law showed me the previous week, I decided to try to get some shots of the birds frozen in time.

Fortunately, many of the birds were willing to cooperate.

Not bad to start with, eh? Although, I admit there were a few rejected photos before this opportunity came along.

Maybe it was because it felt like the first day of spring, but as much as there were many people around enjoying the weather, there were more birds, doing just the same.

You might have noticed the smaller than usual apertures. As my aim was to capture motion, I was shooting in shutter priority mode, something I’ve not done in a while. The secondary hope was that, by having a smaller aperture, I would be able to have a wider depth of field and not have these fast-moving creatures slip out of focus before I should fire the shutter. As will become apparent soon, that wasn’t always successful.

There was quite the variety of birds there – swans, seagulls, geese, coots, pigeons, and what I believe were ravens. The ravens were tricky to capture, because they were so dark they often came out as silhouettes.

With this shot, I’ve attempted to use the same technique I use for the ‘faux HDR’ shots I do from time to time, and played about with the shadows and highlights a bit to replicate the effects of a fill-in flash. It’s not gone too badly, but has brought out some noise in the underside of the bird’s wings.

Fortunately, pigeons are a bit lighter in colour and look far clearer when photographed.

I’ve just noticed the speck on the lens that’s present in most of these photos. Fortunately I’m sure it’s on the lens, not in the body (although there is a bit of a blob in my viewfinder that occasionally bugs me). I need to break out a lens cleaning cloth and give my lenses a once-over.

In hindsight, I’m not sure why I was shooting at such a high ISO; I could probably easily have shot at an ISO of 200 or 300 and maintained the reasonably wide depth of field. Not to worry too much, it hasn’t over-noised any of the images, but it is something I should definitely be aware of in the future.

It wasn’t just birds in flight I was trying to capture, but birds in any form of motion. Including Jesus impressions.

Quite a few of the images in this set are cropped, simply because I was sticking with my 18-135mm daily lens to allow me to open up when the birds flew really close; I didn’t want to be restricted by the 70mm lower end of my telephoto. However it has, on occasion, meant that some of the images captured are a bit lacking and have needed to be cropped in order to get closer to the subject.

Another issue I faced was with the white birds, such as the seagulls or swans; my camera would often meter for the surroundings rather than the bird and as a result they often ended washed out a bit. Fortunately there was usually enough scope to tweak the exposure in post and not too much detail in the birds was lost.

This next image is a shot that suffered – and, I think, recovered – from both issues.

This is a swan landing. They land like seaplanes, coming down on their feet before gracefully lowering their bums into the water (if there is such a thing as a graceful bum lowering).

Although the photo that I took immediately after this one (just after said bum lowering) isn’t quite as impressive, I’m including it as I love the detail in the swan that has come out.

I was actually surprised to see so many flying swans there were. Usually when I’m around with my camera, there’ll only be one, and he’ll fly by whilst I’m not ready, but on this day there were quite a few – enough to have several goes at, er, shooting them.

Not all attempts were that successful, however.

Annoyingly, that shot has not come out pretty out of focus. I’ve seen a few shots like this that are amazingly sharp – like this one – but I don’t quite have that level of skill yet.

Fortunately my field of vision was wide enough to have a few goes at capturing these birds in flight.

Then, the swan did that beautiful delicate wingtip glancing the water thing, and, unlike some people, I made a bit of a hack job of it.

When I compare images like mine with ones like the couple I’ve linked, I always wonder if the difference is skill, luck, patience, or hardware. Maybe it’s all of them.

Certainly, luck was on my side in terms of flying birdage, with swans aplenty showing off for the camera. They even went around in pairs.

Sometimes, I’d be lucky and a bird would come in to land at a nice angle, like this duck.

After a while, the chilly breeze got to us (plus the wife got bored), so we headed off back home. There was, after all, an international rugby game about to descend on the town, so we needed to clear off before there were 82,000 people between us and our home (one of the side effects of living near Twickenham Stadium).

Normally, that would be an end of it. But the next day we found ourselves by the Thames in Kingston eating lunch, and as it was another wonderfully sunny day and there were plenty of birds around, I decided to pick up where I left off the day before.

This time, however, I made a change to my shooting style. Firstly I snapped on my 70-300mm telephoto to try to get a bit closer, and secondly I returned to shooting in aperture priority.

The first shot I took wasn’t really an action shot, but it’s my blog and I can include it if I want to.

I absolutely love the detail in the water in the bottom third of that shot. Anyway, back to the action.

Admittedly this isn’t a fantastic action shot, but you can see a lot of detail in the seagull, which I like. This seagull then came in to land, allowing me to catch one of my favourite photos of this set.

I’m quite, quite lucky that I managed to catch this one a fraction of a second before the seagull’s foot broke the surface of the water. Somehow the rest of the bird looks a touch out of focus whilst its feet are pretty sharp. Can’t explain that one.

Not wanting to be upstaged, a few of the swans started drying off their wings in order to get my attention (that’s definitely the only reason they were doing it).

As you can see, both of these shots also suffered from the same issue I was dealing with the day before, with the swans being blown out a little and needing an exposure adjustment to bring out the detail.

Like in Twickenham, it wasn’t all swans and seagulls, there were pigeons as well.

Luck was still with me a little on the flying swan front, but the only one I saw was flying so high I didn’t see it at first, but I was able to grab some shots as it was coming in to land.

Finally, I noticed a few birds in the water just below where I was on the waterfront. It did mean shooting into the sun a bit, but the end results have come out pretty well.

I was captivated by the sunlight sparkling off of the water as these birds went about their business, which is what I was trying to capture.

It’s nice to be able to post a set that’s not just a random assortment of photos from a place I happened to be but is instead a set based on a theme. Admittedly at times I’ve been a bit loose in my interpretation of the theme, but nonetheless there is definitely a general ethos running here and I’ve kept broadly to it.