In the past few years, the popularity of bird photography and the act of birding has become much more popular. Part of it comes from the pandemic and the other part comes probably from boredom and wanting to do something while hiking. Combine that with many photographers shooting in aperture priority essentially as an auto mode and you’ve got a problem that folks don’t always realize they’ve got. Sometimes their shots are out of focus by just a bit too much to be annoying. So what are you supposed to do?
Trust me, I’m not kidding you when I say this. Stop the lens down. For many, that seems like blasphemy. Traditional mindsets might say, “Well let’s see what images look like when stopped down to f5.6 instead of f8.” But the truth is that at the super telephoto focal lengths, no one will care and it’s not going to make your image any better. Really, really, really believe me on that last statement. We’re currently in a world that is hyper-saturated with birding images that are really, really boring. So at this point, getting beautiful bird photos is really more about capturing them doing really cool and unique things instead.
Most of birding photography is truly nothing special. It’s just like in street photography where you really have to capture a moment that’s unique and different — let alone make people notice something that they otherwise would’ve never paid attention to. Sure, everyone loves looking at wildlife. But show it off doing something special.
When you do that, stop the lens down a bit so that you’ve got a better chance of having the subject sharply in focus when you’re doing that. Always remember too that with full frame cameras, images get softer after f11. And for any smaller sensor, it does it for the equivalent depth of field of f11 on full-frame.
