Better Backyard Bird Photography

 Better Backyard Bird Photography

Taking photos of birds in your backyard can be pretty boring, especially those shots of birds perched on a feeder. To make the pictures seem more natural you can add a staging perch for the birds to stop before they go to the feeder

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If your feeder is on a pole or decorative shepherd’s hook, you can easily add a staging perch by finding a sturdy branch or a thin piece of driftwood and attach it to the pole.  There are several ways you can attach the branch, but the easiest way to do it is to with a U-Bolt. It looks like this:

 

This is a U_Bolt. They come in various sizes. The size you need depends on the thickness of the branch and the post or rod that holds the feeders.The U-bolt shown here is 2 ½ inches wide and 4 3/16 inches deep. I used a U-Bolt that measured 2-inches wide, but they are available in smaller and larger sizes. You don’t have to purchase stainless steel. Zinc plated is fine.

It’s attached over the branch and around the post and tightened with a box wrench.

Here’s what it looks like after it is clamped to the post:

Tighten the u-bolt until the branch no longer slides down or twists around the post. Also, make sure the background doesn’t have any distracting details. 

I used a 100-400 mm telephoto zoom lens and sat about 10-15 feet away from the feeders. The background became completely blurred at f5.6 as in the blue jay and red-wing blackbird images.

I found that as the birds got accustomed to my presence, Icould closer to them 

This little bird posing trick takes your images from these two following examples

to a much more natural looking picture

(Note: This shows an earlier location of the feeder, but the background is too close and includes more detail than I wanted. This f8 @ 1/640 sec. I also could have set the ISO to 200 and reset the F stop to 5.6 and probably the bokeh would have been much better.)