Creative Bird Photography

12.15 MB·English

by  Bill Coster

creative
BIRD
PHOTOGRAPHY
Essential Tips and Techniques
Bill Coster

Text and photographs copyright © 2009 by Bill Coster
Jacket and interior photographs by Bill Coster
First Greystone edition 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher
or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a
copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Greystone Books
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
www.greystonebooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd.
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-545-9 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-55365-932-7 (ebook)
To my wife, Diana, whose love and support for everything I do makes life so much
more worthwhile.
Contents
Introduction
The basics
Digital equipment
Portraits
Flight
Life cycle
Food and drink
Action and behaviour
Dawn and dusk
Being more creative

Introduction
My interest in the natural world goes back to when I was child,
although being brought up in the East End of London was probably
not the best environment for searching out wildlife. No one in my
family was interested in nature, so where or how I become so
fascinated with it is a mystery, even to me. In the urban environment
of my youth, it was small creatures such as insects that first caught
my attention, mainly because there was quite a diverse range of them
around, even in a cityscape. As I grew up and travelled further afield,
my interests broadened while I encountered a much wider variety of
animals and plants, particularly birds.
Photographing wildlife started as just a way of recording what I
had seen, but gradually took over completely, until my trips away
were centred around what I could photograph, rather than on how
many different species I was likely to see. One aspect of bird
photography particularly fascinated me – birds in flight. In the early
days of slow films and manual focus there was not an abundance of
flight shots around, and I discovered that I had a knack for taking
them. This enabled me to carve out a niche in the market, getting
published in bird magazines and eventually signing up with one of
the top natural history agencies in Britain.
While all this was going on I was working in the IT industry, so I
was at rather a disadvantage to many of the full-time photographers
my pictures were competing against. As my sales increased, I finally
decided the time was right and gave up the day job, something I have
never regretted, even for a second. Now I travel the world to
photograph landscapes, mammals, plants, insects and of course
birds. This is a lifestyle I would never have dreamed of as a boy,
searching for caterpillars on the waste ground between houses in
London.
Bird photography is a surprisingly broad subject, covering not only
different aspects of birds’ behaviour, but also different ways of
capturing this with a camera, from simple portraits to impressionist
visions of the birds in their environment. To try and cover such a
large subject matter in one go would be very confusing, so to simplify
things I have divided the main subject of bird photography into
several categories, thus allowing us to concentrate on one aspect at a
time. One chapter is devoted to each of these categories, using
examples of pictures that are further split into the different aspects
of the subject under discussion. So, for example, the chapter on flight
photography contains sections on take-off, landing and flocking, with
different images used for each aspect.
The book is loosely based on a series of articles I wrote as a
photographic consultant for Birds Illustrated entitled ‘Being creative
with your camera’. A magazine article is necessarily quite brief, so
the book contains not only many more pictures, but also more
categories and much more information.
Although there is a chapter with advice on camera and computer
equipment based on my own experience, the main thrust of the book
is about using that most precious piece of photographic equipment –
your creativity. There are quite a few books on the market that deal
with the nuts and bolts of how to use your camera to get pictures of
birds, covering the practical side of bird photography. In recent
years, with the advent of digital photography, we have learned a
whole new skill-set to make the most of digital images using software
packages such as Adobe Photoshop, and there are countless books on
this subject. It would be pointless to repeat this information in here.
Every image in the main section of the book includes exposure
details where available, and the text contains information about the
circumstances surrounding the making of each picture. The main
focus of the book is on creating good images of the birds you meet,
going about their often complex and fascinating lives.
Photography, like any art form, is very subjective, and what one
person likes another may not. There are certain general ‘rules’ about
composition, and I refer to some of them while discussing the
pictures in the main part of the book. However, I’ve never been a
great stickler for rules in many aspects of life, and over the years