Beauty in Flight

If it's hard to photograph a bird doing one of the cute little things birds do for fractions of a second, it's impossible to photograph a bird in flight.

Birds, particularly lovebirds, fly pretty fast. This means that you'll have to worry plenty about whether or not they are in focus when you snap your picture. Their wings will also blur unless you have a really fast shutter speed- think 1/500s. Therefore, if you want reasonable lighting, even though I have some hotlighs set up in the room (on loan from the art department, along with the cool umbrella reflectors), they can't always be pointed at where the bird is going to fly. So you'll probably need to have the flash as well, but this may reduce the speed at which you can take multiple shots- so you'll have to set yourself up with the bird several times. Even with the flash, you will want a very sensitive camera. I think this was shot at ISO sensitivity of about 1600. Thank goodness for fancy cameras on loan from the art department!

Next, you need to actually get the bird in the photo. In practice, I have found the best way to do this is to slowly walk up to the bird, aiming the camera, constantly keeping the focus aligned (manual focus, of course), and when you're pretty close, start snapping. If the bird hasn't already started to fly when you've pressed the shutter button, the flash will probably encourage it to start flying pretty soon as well. And if you're lucky, you'll be close enough and have just the right angle to have the bird IN the photograph and it won't be out of focus and maybe you'll capture the beauty of color and feathers in flight.




The shadow is on the ceiling, not the wall. The layout of this shot can be seen at [link]