Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
One of the most popular photo seminars in the world happens every December, when hundreds of photographers flock to the tiny town of Socorro, New Mexico to document the migration of some 20,000 birds en route to Mexico.
Could I pull it off with just an iPhone?
After sharing with us this year’s finalists back in April, Bird Photographer of the Year has selected the winners of the 2021 contest. This year, the overall award has gone into hands of Alejandro Prieto for his image of a roadrunner stopped in its track by the USA-Mexico border wall. But as always, there are plenty more stunning photos in the selection, and we bring you some of them below.
Bird Photographer of the Year is one of those contests that give us an insight into the fascinating and versatile world of animals. In this contest’s case, it’s obviously the birds. I personally love all feathery creatures, so I’m happy to share with you today the finalists of the 2021 WPOTY contest.
I don’t know about you, but when I see a birdie, I really wish I could get a closer look at it and have it land on my finger. Of course, wild birds aren’t really into that and they only let us admire them from afar. But Lisa aka Ostdrossel has found a way to approach birds, even take their photos, without startling them. She has built a feeder-mounted camera that automatically takes stunning photos of our feathery friends.
We’ve seen some incredible examples of bird photography, video, and even weirdly beautiful audio. But photographer Jocelyn Anderson takes filming birds on a more personal level. Her little models eat out of her hand, and I mean it quite literally. As she feeds them, she films them in a series of incredibly soothing and heartwarming slow-motion videos.
I’ve always loved birds and appreciated their company while chilling in the backyard of my family home. The 2020 winners of Bird Photographer of the Year (BPOTY) bring the fascinating world of birds even closer to us. In this article, we bring you the overall winner as well as category winners. The selection of marvelous photos shows the birds’ behavior, their wonderful and quirky features, and their interaction with the environment.
With lockdown restrictions starting to be eased in various parts of the world, many will want to get back into shooting photography outside of their home again. One excellent worthwhile genre you can cover that still lets you follow the social distancing guidelines which are still in place for most of us is bird photography, particularly when they’re in flight.
In this video, Steve Perry teaches us just about everything we could ever want to know to get started photographing birds in flight. As you’ll see, it presents a lot of great challenges. And learning how to overcome those challenges can also be useful in many other types of photography, too.
Itamar Campos is a Brazilian landscape and nature photographer whose “birds sitting on long lens” images have caused marvel among his peers and photographers in general.
The bird images are captured inside the Atlantic Forest which is 70km outside the city Curitiba, where Itamar resides. The city is located in the Parana state in the southern parts of Brazil.
Itamar tells DIYP that it is only during the coldest winter days that he heads out for bird photography. His secret spot is a small ranch in the middle of the Atlantic Forest. Eight hours of bird watching may result in as much as 2,000 to 3,000 images, but, according to Itamar, only 10 to 15 of them yield a satisfying result. A great image with which he is happy equals a good composition and a variety of birds on and around the Canon 400mm lens. How he manages to have up to five bird species in the frame is Itamar’s well-kept secret.
When you photograph birds, their beauty really gets in focus against a clean and simple background. But when you’re out there with your camera, it can be pretty difficult to get a nice and clean background in bird photos. In this video, Jan Wegener shares a couple of simple tricks that will help you raise your photos to a whole new level.
Last year I joined my local photography club. The club holds regular competitions and I was amazed by the quality of the bird and wildlife photographs. I’ve never been much of a natural history photographer. So it’s not surprising that my own photographs did very poorly in competitions. In particular, a judge criticised a woodpecker photograph that I submitted because it was clearly on a bird feeder. “Hand of man!” he said as he dismissed my attempt.
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