Wildlife photographer Don Orkoskey explains that the Nikon D850 is just one piece of bird photography. Listen for calls to find subjects, position yourself with the sun behind you, and watch for the moment birds defecate before takeoff, since they take off into the wind. Spring migration gives you the best light and the most vocal males.
Having great gear like the Nikon D850 is only going to get you so far in bird photography. To be truly great, you really have to see what others are not seeing. Hi there, my name is Don and I'm a wildlife photographer, and I'm going to tell you the things that I do to help me improve my success when photographing birds. Chances are that you see birds pretty much everywhere, but the second you break out your Nikon D850 and a giant long lens, they all seemingly disappear. Now, in all seriousness, bird photography can be a big waiting game. It requires a lot of patience because finding birds and getting great photos of them is really not easy. And this is especially true if you are new to bird photography. Other than just waiting for birds to show up, it's really helpful if we go to where they are. Now, if you have bird feeders in your backyard and are successful at attracting birds to those already, that is a perfectly okay place to do bird photography. And before anyone jumps in the comments and says, oh, it's cheating because you're taking their pictures around the feeder, let me explain something. If you are hired by, say, the company that Sir David Attenborough uses to produce wildlife documentaries. You are going to the places where the animals are, and that's often areas where they eat and sleep and drink and so on and so forth. So there's nothing cheating about taking pictures of birds where they are, regardless of if that's at your bird feeder or out in the wild. At least not in my book. If you disagree, go ahead and comment. So let's talk about how to find birds that may not be in your backyard. The first thing that we're going to do is we're actually going to use our ears more than our eyes, because we need to listen for bird calls. And following those calls, we can often find— I'm so chewed up by mosquitoes here. By following those bird calls, we can usually get to a place where we can find birds to photograph. Once we've gotten there though, we may still have problems finding them, and that's where we can now begin to use our eyes and look for motion. One trick with this is that you're going to be distracted by wind. It happens. And the other thing you're going to be distracted by is squirrels, because squirrels love to mess with bird photographers. So we've used our ears, we've listened for some birds, we've now gone to where those birds were calling, we're now using our eyes to look around and find them, but how do we really maximize our success? Well, my first recommendation would be when you go listen and watch and photograph birds, because Spring migration, which is happening right now as I'm making this video, is an excellent time. It's probably the best time of year to photograph birds. In fact, because birds are in their mating season, spring migration is the time when you're going to see the most colorful male birds, and it's when they're going to make the most noise calling out To mates or potential mates. When it comes to time of day, not just time of year, but time of day, going out early in the morning or late at night as the sun is setting is going to give you much better results when it comes to photographing birds. Now, the reason for that is, as you've maybe heard, before the sun comes up, birds begin to be more active. So for the hour or more right after sunrise, you will find a lot of birds out eating or drinking. And of course, this time of year they're building nests. That makes morning time an ideal and probably the best time of day to go out and photograph birds. Now, that being said, you can also go out in the evening. You can go out at midday. The number of successful shots you're going to come away with is going to be lower for a number of reasons. In addition to understanding sort of the general location of where birds are, one way that you will have much more success is if you understand the types of birds that you are intending to photograph. Great bird photographers also understand the need to check the edges. And what do I mean by edges? I mean the areas where 2 biomes meet. So if you have an open field and a forest, that's an area that you're going to have more success because there's going to be birds that prefer that open field, birds that prefer that forest, and birds that prefer the area that is in between those 2. Additionally, not only understanding where those birds are, but how they behave is going to help you immensely. For example, and this is going to sound a little silly, but a lot of birds will poop before they take off, and good bird photographers know that. So we will watch for them to poop and shortly thereafter begin to do a continuous burst of photos in the hopes that we can get them taking off and have them in flight. Beyond pooping, birds tend to take off into the wind. So if you are positioned in a place where the wind is blowing from your back to your front, you're more likely to have birds take off towards you. That leads me to talking about where you position yourself, because the thing with photographing birds is that if you're constantly moving, if you're constantly in motion, those birds are going to scatter. And it's going to take a while for them to come back, which is why good bird photographers typically spend a good deal of time in a space before moving on, at least 20 minutes, because that's generally, in my experience, the cycle that tends to happen as birds are coming in and going out of an area. Normally, after 20 minutes, some birds will start to come back to where they were. Once you've settled into that area. So if you position yourself well, the sun should be in a place where it's going to light the birds the way you want it to. Now that's normally with them being well lit, um, with the sun possibly behind you, and also in areas where the background is not going to be super busy. If there's a bunch of branches behind where the birds are, And they're very close to the birds. It's, it's just messier. If you have nice open shots without that mess of branches, you're going to like those a lot better. It generally does take a lot of time to get good at finding birds and photographing them well, even with a great camera like the Nikon D850. So to hear more about the specifics of this camera and why it's my go-to camera, Check out this video next. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye.
