Bird Photographers: Avoid These Rookie Mistakes

Getting started in bird photography is a path of making many, many mistakes before finding out what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few valuable tips to save you time from learning the hard way.

In this video from bird photographer Stefano Ianiro, he shares four tips that cover a range of things any bird photographer will eventually encounter. This includes how to deal with that pesky heat distortion that will ruin all your photos, image stabilization and the precautions you need to know, the importance of white balance and tint while editing bird photos, and how to fix color casts on your birds.

Ianiro goes a step further and shows the exact process on how to go into Photoshop to correct those color casts. One thing I will say here is that with any editing there is a balance to things. For example, as a means of camouflaging themselves better, some birds have evolved a white underside for the express purpose of reflecting the color on the ground. So while we can say that these white feathers of a bird should technically be white in a studio setting, it’s not entirely accurate to their role and purpose in evolution by having them unnaturally void of color cast within their habitat. It’s up to you as the artist to decide how much of that you want to take into account, so playing with the adjustment layer’s opacity slider can be your friend here.

Check out the video above for all the tips in full detail.