Bird Photography with 70-200mm Zoom and Smaller Lenses

The trick to this photo involved having selected a large RAW image file (46 megapixels) on my Nikon D850, cropping it radically and then denoising it, because ISO was high, over 3000. Even with having cropped it severely, it retains resolution. The eye is prominent.

Target Large Birds

Calling on all you amateurs out there who think you need 600mm to photograph birds. That may indeed be true, if you have warblers in mind, but large birds like herons, egrets, geese, ducks, and mergansers are all possibilities using a 70-200mm zoom. If you can get a 1.4 teleconverter (extender), that will increase your range to 280mm on a full frame DSLR, and 420mm on a 1.5 crop factor camera like the Nikon D7100 I sometimes use.

I have been in situations when I’ve chosen to use my crop camera over my much more expensive full frame, so I could get in closer. But with 46 megapixels to subtract from, just cropping a D850 image, so long as it is a large file, will leave you plenty of pixels to spare and get you in close. As I did after shooting the great blue heron, above. No more than 20% of those original 46 megapixels are leftover in that shot, maybe more like 15%, and yet the eye is sharp.

Not everyone will afford a Nikon D850, but even the 24 megapixel D7100 crop camera allows you plenty of play at cropping. Besides, it’s called a “crop” camera, but when you get 420mm by using an extender on a 200mm lens and the 1.5 crop factor of the D7100, that’s 420mm at 24 megapixels before you do any actual cropping.

Common mergansers on a river close to home. I had expected to shoot river scenes without any birds in the frames.

Rely on Fortune

If all of your lenses are 200mm and fewer, you’re not a bird photographer by profession, and you’re probably not primarily a bird photographer as a hobbyist, either. Speaking for myself I have never gone on a photography outing with birds in mind. They’ve always occasioned outings when I planned on what amounts to either landscape (including rivers and lakes) or fishing photography. (The latter is not as easy to do as may seem, by the way.)

Birds take me by surprise, and I’m always grateful to them when I get a good shot. As you can see in the photo above, the mergansers felt taken by surprise, too. The expression on the face of the front one is hilarious, as you can see by opening up the image on desktop.

Great blue heron across from me as the South Branch Raritan River flows through Ken Lockwood Gorge, a place where you might expect the species. The ISO registered very high at 12800, but since I shot a large RAW file, I was enabled to crop by about 40% after denoising the image in LIghtroom.

Denoise High ISO

Sometimes, not only is the subject in shadow; the whole image is on the dark side. The result is an image shot at high ISO, because you couldn’t have got the shot while using a tripod. Denoising images containing a lot of grain can do wonders for eliminating roughshod details. The heron’s head in the image shot in Ken Lockwood Gorge above is a whole lot cleaner, after I used the AI denoise function in Lightroom. I wouldn’t say the image lacks detail anywhere else in it, either, but none of the details are that ugly, clumpy kind that, however subtly, turn the viewer away.

I formerly used Lightroom 6, and I didn’t like the denoise options because they made the images smooth in a plastic sort of way, as if the details had been melted into the scenes. After upgrading to the subscription Lightroom Classic, I felt fully satisfied with what using the AI denoise amounts to.

I have thought of buying Topaz AI, but so far, I’m just not serious enough to invest in it. Some years back, I bought the Affinity Photo standalone so I could focus stack images, and I got some wonderful results from using the program, but I was out there stacking photos week after week. Topaz also has a powerful sharpening tool, and I do have just a small handful of images I could try it on…but really. Is it worth it to me?

It may be to you, and the denoise tool, also. But I heartily recommend just trying Lightroom first and seeing if it’s enough.

The group of female mallards did not congeal until after a longish wait.

Patience and Persistence

Patience and Persistence. That’s the title of one of the hundreds of fishing articles I’ve written, and the same principle applies to birding with a camera. Or, as I say, being taken by surprise by a bird or any number of them…and suddenly finding yourself being a birder.

Birds are like any other living creature—unpredictable. If you don’t like the image the bird or birds before you is or are presenting, hang out for a little while and you may feel surprised. I waited on the ducks in the photo above for at least five minutes before they did the unexpected and grouped together in the form I photographed.

The ISO was pretty high at, if I recall rightly, 3200, so I denoised the image and got cleaner feathers, though I’m not happy with the profile of the duck with the raised head, which hasn’t to do with AI denoise. The way the water is ribbed, with a thick dark rib meeting the duck’s head at eye level, distracts attention subtly.

Images will have strong points and drawbacks, but I am especially annoyed by that black water.

A great blue heron caught on a large rock of the South Branch Raritan River in the Ken Lockwood Gorge. It almost seems to be part of those rocks.

Camouflage

The bird itself doesn’t necessarily need to be the entire subject. As you can see in the photograph above, the boulders are just as important as the subject matter otherwise. Without them, the heron would stand in the water and the viewer would have no sense of its being camouflaged slightly. Look at how the bluish color of rock complements the blue of the great blue heron. The iron color in the foreground brings contrast to the image as well, as the flow in the lower third to the right contrasts against the relatively stable water to the left.

I’ve always felt I got lucky with this image, because the branches and leaves of the tree hanging down underneath the top edge do not cover or cross the bird. In fact, the bird’s bill, head, and neck are framed by leaves and a branchlet. I might not have thought to reposition and get that frame effect, or perhaps I did reposition to get it.

Compose images carefully, mindfully. Had I positioned otherwise, I wouldn’t have captured the effect I just explained. You can always expect things to generally work in your favor when it comes to composition, but you do need to develop an accurate eye and work with the things moving in your favor, adjust so as to meet them in a way that is artistically effective.

If you take your time—I must have spent at least five minutes—approaching a heron carefully, it may let you get surprisingly close.

Turn Vibration Reduction On

Most likely, you won’t be using a tripod when photographing birds, so, in that case, make sure what Nikon calls vibration reduction is on. It’s also known as image stabilization, and it makes a difference in protecting against hand shake.

Also, if you’re shooting at 200mm, mind the shutter speed. It needs to be set at 1/200th of a second at the least for a full frame camera. For a crop camera with a 1.5 crop factor, the minimum is 1/300th, and if the crop factor is 1.6, 1/320th. If you do use an extender, adjust the shutter speed to correspond with whatever focal length you employ by the proper ratios. Keep in mind, of course, that the higher the shutter speed you select, the higher will be the ISO.

I used Lightroom’s AI denoise for image above, and as you can see, it did a clean job at preserving detail. The texture in this image I feel to be compelling, but I didn’t need to slide the texture slider to the right to enhance it.

I actually shot this black-crowned night heron while using a Nikon 50mm prime lens, f/1.8. Kayaking through dense Florida mangroves, the bird was so close to me I could almost reach out and pet it. I managed to keep the ISO down to 200. Very crisp shot, even though it’s cropped by at least 40%

Shoot in Manual Mode

If you haven’t learned Manual Mode, the sooner you do, the better. It’s easy. I used to shoot in Aperture Priority Mode, as if Manual would be too complicated, but it’s not. Set ISO to automatic and let your selections of aperture and shutter speed determine that ISO. Always try to keep the aperture as open as possible, and shutter speed as low as possible, with one caveat to keep in mind.

That is, that if you shoot, say, at 1/50th of a second for such a 50mm prime lens as I used for the shot, above, not only is any sudden motion going to blur the image where it’s in motion, if your hand is unsteady, it’s going to blur everything.

Snowy egret shot at Barnegat Inlet, Jersey Shore. Notice how soft the head is. If the head were altogether sharp, the rest might have been forgivable.

The egret in the photo above allowed me to shoot in close range. I used an 18-55mm kit lens on my D7100. Suddenly, the egret flushed it’s wings, and, wow, I shot.

Not only the wings are blurry. I shot at 1/160th of a second, the focal length 55mm. That shutter speed was too slow to freeze the motion, the worst of which is the softness of the head and bill. I’m on the fence about the rest of the photo. It’s pretty cool—maybe. Possibly, the blurry effect is an enhancement. Topaz sharpen might be able to cure that softness of the head, which all but kills the shot regardless of other considerations.

A mother goose and chick shot along Pennsylvania’s Delaware Canal at Yardley.

Respect Your Subject

Canada geese will let you get fairly close to them, but keep the tension in their favor. Not only will that allow you to get between a mother goose and, say, a fence without getting attacked, it’s respectful of life just like yours.

In the case of the photograph I got, above, I stood on the bank opposite to the one the mother and chick had just climbed up from Pennsylvania’s Delaware Canal.

Since I used my 200mm zoom and the 1.4 extender wide open on my D850, I shot at 1/320th of a second, which is the next increment higher than 1/250th. The rather high shutter speed proved convenient, to say the least, in freezing that right foot forward and lower leg of the mother goose, even though it troubles me as not being fully frozen.

The focus is spot on, when it comes to the mother’s eye, but I could have narrowed the aperture some to get a crisp image of the gosling.

The warm light of sundown with a little bit of edge in the sand and the wood.

Make Images Pop a Little

Emphasis on “little” for this one. For one thing, the warm light of sundown invites a soft touch, and that’s not snow on the ground. Which, by the way, I had to do some fancy work with, opening up shadows, increasing exposure (not by much) and shifting the white balance from blue towards yellow to make it look like the sand it is. That shift also helped with accentuating the warmth of the light, which, after all, was that way when I was present. (Though not quite as colorful altogether, no.)

Use the contrast slider to make it pop, but not by too much. Pay attention to the histogram, also, another presumably complicated aspect of Lightroom that’s really easy to use. Make sure the shadows to the right are just barely into the white indicator, the same for the blacks to the left, so be careful with the contrast slider, and, also, don’t add clarity beyond 50%. It gets garish.

Unfortunately, that seagull is anything but crisp.

A great egret stalks the river shallows of the South Branch Raritan River in the Neshanic, New Jersey, region.

High Contrast

When it works for you, high contrast can be an exciting photographic phenomena. Don’t believe for a second that you have all that goes into a composition under your own control. You do, in the sense that you alone engage the shutter, but clicking a button is hardly art.

So many blog posts, however, stroke the ego a little too much, in my opinion, as if composition is fully something you do, rather than being something done to you by nature.

But breathe a little relief at the following thought. The same is true of realistic paintings. What the painter selects is stock taken of nature; no matter how much imagination rearranges things to create an original scene on canvas, it depends on such scenes existing in nature. Obviously. But as photographers, we often feel self-doubt about our status as artists, when painters depend on nature doing it to them, too.

A great deal depends on post-processing a RAW image.

I could have taken more shadow out of the background, but I didn’t want to. The image would have been a little more realistic, if I had, but I’m working with bright light in the foreground, bright white at the edges of the egret, and very important—the light on the water where it meets the foreground and extends behind the bird. It accentuates that bird’s presence, gives it a context of being, as the dark background accentuates its presence, but gives it no such context. Consider that the egret is preying upon small fish, and that context of visible water the bird stands in becomes all the more immediate to sense.

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I have a lot of admiration for people who go birding with an 800mm or even 1000mm lens, getting crisp photos of rare warblers. I’ve seen it done along Old Mine Road in Warren County, New Jersey, inside Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, but I’ll surely never be one of them, because there’s only so much I can do.

The door remains open, not only for more bird shots of mine, but any of yours. As I’ve pointed out, even a 50mm prime lens is all you may need in some situations. It’s all about the encounter, bottom line. Your engagement with subject matter that fundamentally presents itself, but to which you have to approach in various subtle ways to get a memorable photograph. A photograph that essentially reflects that engagement as if you were gathering a story. That’s the memorable quality.