Autumn & Winter: keep your skills sharp
With winter now well and truly upon us in the northern hemisphere, it is easy to confine your camera to family portraits for the upcoming festivities.
However, late autumn and winter are the times when most landscape (and wildlife) photographers would tell you is their favourite time of the year. When there is no cloud cover the advantages are late sunrises and the sun being low in the sky for most of the day giving an incredible quality of light and long shadows. These are conditions that can give you stunning results.
With that in mind, and knowing it will be some months before I get an opportunity to consider a return trip to South Africa, I recently looked for opportunities to keep my skills sharp. Just 2 weeks ago I was in the UK and spent one day at the International Birds of Prey Centre, and another day at Charlecotte Park in Warwickshire. Many of the photos I took on those days I will share on my Facebook page in December. But I wanted to blog about my experience with birds of prey.
During my second trip to South Africa this year I started to take some shots of birds. I was so fortunate on the game drives to see so many big cat sightings, I decided it would be good to diversify a little and take some shots of birds. I was lucky enough to see African Snake Eagles, and Walhbergs Eagles. I also saw various hornbills, the iconic rollers (lilac breasted) and other smaller birds. But photographing them was very challenging. Not least because you need a very long focal lens, in the region of at least 300mm, and preferably double that. The other challenge is shooting the flight of these birds. You need high shutter speeds, the ability to auto-focus fast (not easy using a teleconverter) and a good knowledge of how the iso will affect the noise in your final image. After trying (and mostly failing) in South Africa to photograph birds, I A) had a new found respect for bird photographers and B) decided to get up to speed!
The International Birds of Prey Centre is in Newent, Gloucestershire, which is a beautiful rural part of the UK right on the boarder of England and Wales, with the Malvern Hills and Ross-on-Wye not far away. It is open all year round, expect for December and January when the centre closes due to the cold weather. They have a hugely impressive collection of birds of prey; raptors, eagles and owls. They also have regular flying demonstrations. I visited the last week of November, just days before they planned to close for December and January. It was a crisp and golden autumn day, and I couldn't have wished for better conditions. With a total of 4 visitors for the first morning flight and 2 visitors for the afternoon flight, myself included, I pretty much had the photographic field of view to myself!
The centre allows you to wander through the enclosures to view the birds. There is one area where the birds are put out in the open, tethered and on display, a great opportunity for some portraits. But many of the other birds will be behind cages. This shouldn't put you off from taking photos of them. You just need to think about how you are going to photograph them!
This photo is of an Eurasian Griffon Vulture. It was caged. It is a stunning bird, with incredible plumage. The key with this shot was to use a low f-stop and manual focus. Like this the bars of the cage were thrown out of focus. I zoomed in and composed at 200mm focal length and had a high shutter speed in case the vultures head moved. Using an f-stop of 4. By positioning the angle of the lens I was able to use the plumage feathers at the rear of the bird as a background, and by using an f-stop of 4 I was able to gently knock that out of focus. You could never tell from the resulting photograph that the vulture is in captivity - and that was my objective!
The flight demonstrations were a great experience. Different birds of different sizes fly at different speeds and flight patterns. Each bird presented it's own challenge. The owls for example would swoop very very low to the ground before getting airborne. It is a good idea to watch the first few flights of a bird in order to anticipate the composition when you do start to shoot. The Steller's Sea Eagle was a good example of this. This birds are immense! With a wing span of up to 2.5 meters, you need to think ahead and understand how and when you will fill the frame when the bird is in flight. Now this is a blog about keeping your skills sharp. Photographing the Steller's Sea Eagle certainly helped me do that, and taught me a valuable lesson...
This shot I took at 135mm, f4.0, 1/1250 at ISO 1000. I needed the high shutter speed to get the wings in focus, and as a result (combined with the autumn light) the iso needed to be pushed quiet high. The issue I have with this image, and it's my own personal critique, is that the background isn't knocked out of focus enough for me. This is simply because the lowest f-stop I can achieve with a teleconverter is f4. If I had been able to stop to f2.8 the result would have looked a little more organic with a nice soft background. So my lessons learnt were, the depth of field is just as important as the sharpness of the subject with birds, and the distance between subject and background issue is critical if you are limited with your aperture.
One of the highlights for me was the demonstration of the owl. This owl was very habituated and the handler positioned himself deliberately to allow me to get some fantastic flyby's - at one point I was worried my lens hood would clip its wing, it was that well habituated. He is a stunning owl and this shot you will see him flying towards me from a walnut tree. This is one of my favourite images:
I love the fact I was able to capture the perfect symmetry of the wingspan in flight and get the image sharp all the way through. This was shot at an f-stop of 4, and as I took a sequence of about 5 shots as the owl took off for flight, the tree branches in focus give great perspective to this composition.
So the eagle and the owl gave me some great shots in flight. However the bigger challenge came from some of the smaller raptors. These birds can fly super fast. One of the falcons on display was a hybrid. I may get this wrong, but I understood it to be some form of gyrfalcon hybrid. This thing moved!
But I was able to get some good shots. Again this is where anticipation of what the animal will do being as important as the technical skill of using the camera. Notice in this image the wing position. I actually observed two passes first (through my lens) and realised that the bird showed the most consistent movement when diving, and the the fastest most sporadic movement when flapping its wings. This Falcon actually rocked and that reminded me very much of the rollers I'd seen rolling in South Africa. So I waited until the Falcon dived to fire off a few shots. This gave me half a chance to pick the bird up in my viewfinder!
The final image I will share in this blog is when I felt everything came together! During the last flying demonstration, there was a feeding demonstration of kites. This was to show how a group of kites would feed mid air. Rather than expend valuable energy landing, they captured small morels of prey in their talons, and mid air would throw them to their beak level, and catch them to eat. This was spectacular viewing. I had no expectation of capturing this behaviour in an image. The speed in which they do this is incredible. But from a photographic perspective I was able to meet one of my objectives. All the key learnings during the day, the bird flights, culminated in the final set of images of these kites. I was able to balance; subject sharpness, depth of field, luminosity and contrast, great autumn colours and light, and a striking mid flight composition. I'd learnt the technical shooting side and the difficulties of shooting bird in flight. But most importantly, I'd understood that anticipation comes with experience and this is as important in wildlife photography as is pushing the button on your camera body.
200mm f4, 1/2000 ISO 1250
I will be posting images from my visit to the International Bird of Prey Centre throughout December on my Facebook page so be sure to connect with me there: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jon-Bryant-Photography/608458905882777
In January I will be posting my full catalogue of images on my website here.