Tips For Great Photos Of Birds In Flight

One of the most demanding forms of wildlife and nature photography is photographing birds in flight. Of course, just getting great bird shots in general is difficult because they are usually always on the move and very wary of your presence. But when they take off and start to fly, the difficulty of getting a good clear shot while they are flying is compounded many times over.

To get great shots of birds in flight, your equipment has to be up to the task at hand. This means that your camera will need to be able to shoot multiple frames per second to make sure that you get a frame with the wings of your bird in the right position to make a pleasing shot. How many frames per second is good enough? Generally, I prefer at least 5 frames per second, but more is even better.

The cameras I have been using lately are Sony SLTs which means "single lens translucent" cameras. In other words, they do not have a mirror that flips up to expose the camera sensor every time a shot is taken. This allows for rapid shooting up to 12 frames per second and that is plenty fast. You can still get great BIF (birds in flight) shots if you are shooting Nikon or Canon or any other brand, but whatever camera you are using, it is made much easier when the shooting speed of your camera is at least 5 frames per second.

Some photographers like to hold the shutter button down and fire off 2-3 seconds worth of continuous shots at these high frame rates, but I am not a fan of that method. Instead I like to shoot in smaller bursts of 5-6 frames and then recompose the bird in my viewfinder and fire another burst. It just seems to help me get more keepers by doing that.

In future posts I'll discuss the importance of rapid focusing to get clear BIF shots too. In the meantime, here is a shot I took recently of an osprey at Circle B Bar Reserve with a little backlighting on his wings:

This osprey was really moving as he was almost directly overhead when this shot was taken.