James Harcourt
Start with the birds that will forgive you
Every photograph of a bird in flight is a small negotiation between your reflexes and the bird's intentions. The good news is that you do not need a professional lens to learn that negotiation. You need repetition, and repetition is easiest to find in the birds that live alongside us.
Herring gulls over a seaside car park, feral pigeons in a town square, jackdaws on a playing field, mallards lifting off a park pond — these are your training partners. They are large enough to track, they fly predictably, and they will give you another chance five minutes later. A hobby dashing over a hedgerow will not.
Spend a few sessions deliberately practising on gulls and pigeons before you point your camera at anything rare. By the time a merlin or a barn owl appears, your hands will already know what to do.
The three settings that matter most
Flight photography rewards a simple, disciplined setup. Everything else follows from these three things.
- Shutter speed. This is the non-negotiable one. Aim for at least 1/1000 second for gulls and pigeons, 1/1600 to 1/2000 for smaller, faster birds such as swifts, swallows or waders. If your images show a smeared wingtip, your shutter is too slow.
- Continuous autofocus. Switch your camera to its continuous mode — often labelled AF-C or servo — so the focus keeps adjusting while you hold the shutter half-pressed. Single-shot focus will lock onto where the bird was, not where it is.
- Burst mode. Set your drive mode to its fastest continuous setting. Even a modest frame rate gives you three or four wing positions to choose from, and the sharpest frame is rarely the first.
Then let the camera handle exposure. Auto ISO with a sensible ceiling — 3200 on most modern entry-level bodies, higher if you are comfortable with noise — keeps the shutter speed where it needs to be. Shoot wide open or one stop down; f/5.6 or f/6.3 is perfectly respectable when the bird fills a decent part of the frame.
Technique: track, pan, and squeeze
Stand side-on to the flight path rather than facing the bird head-on. A profile or three-quarter angle gives you the wings, the eye and a sense of speed, and it keeps the bird moving across your frame rather than towards you.
Plant your feet, tuck your elbows in against your ribs, and turn from the waist as the bird passes. Follow it through the viewfinder with both eyes open if you can manage it — your peripheral vision will help you anticipate. Pick the bird up early, before it reaches you, and keep the focus point over its head or chest. The head is the part that must be sharp; a slightly soft tail feather is forgivable.
Fire in short bursts of three to five frames rather than holding the shutter down for the whole pass. Long bursts fill cards, drain batteries and usually produce a lot of near-identical files. And resist the urge to check the back of the camera after every bird. Watch the sky instead, and learn the flight lines.
Getting more from modest kit
A bridge camera or an entry-level body with a 70–300mm zoom is genuinely capable of good flight images in decent light. A few habits will close the gap between your kit and something far more expensive.
- Use the long end of your zoom, but pull back very slightly. It is easier to crop a complete bird than to retrieve one that has clipped the edge of the frame.
- Shoot in raw if your camera allows it. You can recover a surprising amount from a slightly underexposed frame, and bright sky behind a dark bird is a common problem.
- Carry a monopod if your lens is heavy. It steadies the pan without the restriction of a tripod.
- Keep a spare battery and card in a warm inside pocket. Cold weather flattens batteries quickly, and the best light often arrives on the coldest mornings.
- Clean your front element and check for dust. At small apertures, a smudge becomes a soft haze across every shot.
Bright, even light is your friend. Flight photography in Britain is often easiest in the middle of a clear day, so do not feel you must restrict yourself to the golden hours. Save those for perched subjects.
Fieldcraft: learn the flight lines
The most reliable way to improve is to stop chasing and start waiting. Birds use the same routes again and again, and once you know them you can position yourself rather than react.
Watch which direction the wind is coming from — most birds take off and land into it, which makes their approach predictable. Look for updraughts along cliff edges and seawalls, where gulls and fulmars hang almost motionless. Roosts fill up in the last hour of light, and high tide pushes waders onto a narrow band of shore. Around farmland, gulls and corvids follow the plough; along a harbour wall, they follow the ferries.
Approach slowly and keep your distance, especially around nests, roosts and young birds. Disturbance is both a welfare issue and a legal one, and a bird flushed from a nest is a photograph you should not have taken. Stay on paths, use a hide or a car as a mobile blind, and let the birds come to you.
Keep a journal beside your memory card
Nature journaling and bird photography are natural companions, and together they will teach you faster than either does alone. After each session, jot down the date, time, weather, wind direction and temperature. Note the species, how many, and what they were doing.
Then add the technical detail: shutter speed, ISO, where the light was coming from, and what went wrong. A page that reads "1/1600, ISO 1250, sun behind me, gulls heading into a south-westerly, several sharp frames on the turn" is worth more than a folder of unlabelled images.
A very rough sketch of a bird's wing position helps too — it forces you to look carefully at shape and posture rather than just at the screen. Over a season, your notes will show you which spots work, which winds bring birds low, and how much your keeper rate has climbed. That quiet record, more than any upgrade, is what turns a patient beginner into a confident one.
