Photograph Wild Birds With Simon Roy

Simon Roy is an award-winning wildlife photographer based in the UK. Watch this video to learn how he captures incredible images of wild birds. 

Wildlife photography, especially photographing birds, can be extremely difficult. Most photographers either get lucky by stumbling across wild animals in nature, or some spend their entire lives in the field learning how to track and capture images of wildlife in the field. Depending on your personal ethics and thoughts on wildlife photography, one intuitive trick introduced in this video is to manipulate nature in your favor. Roy explains how he sets up a perch for the birds to land on littered with bird seed with the proper photographic angle in mind, which will help him capture bird imagery. 

Another technique introduced by Roy is to know the behavior of the wildlife you're hoping to photograph. All animals behave differently, even different species of birds. It might be a good idea to study the behavior ahead of time of the specific bird species you're headed out to capture. 

One thing not clearly or fully mentioned is to consider the background of your composition. You don't want a messy and distracting background that will take away from your main subject. In the video, Roy sets his tripod and lens so that he is shooting down and facing the ground which guarantees a clean and smooth background. One thing that could also help with this is using a fast lens that has an aperture of f/4.0 or f/2.8. By doing so, you'll be sure to have smooth and blurry backgrounds in most any condition. 

Watch the video above to learn more helpful tips for photographing birds. 

Lead image taken by Andrea Reiman on Unsplash.