Bird photography these days has gotten so much easier thanks to scene detection in cameras that can find birds pretty easily. You can set them to scan the entire area or give them a bit of assistance with using a specific focusing point. And that’s all great for the technical stuff. But to make a more visually intriguing image, there’s something else that you should try. When you look at images that aren’t shot for social media shares and views, you’d rarely see this style of imagery. Here’s something that very few photographers talk about.
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Our tip: shoot vertical images of birds. This is something that a photographer is more likely to think about if they’re shooting with a Canon R1 or a Nikon Z9 simply because they have vertical grips built into them. But shooting a vertical image can give a much more fascinating or unusual perspective that you’d otherwise not always see unless you’re trying to shoot for social media.
Sure, lots of wildlife and bird photographers shoot for social media because they’re leading tours or are influencers. But if you’re planning to shoot for documentaries like those that the Discovery channel or PBS does, then there’s something different involved here.
Why shoot vertical? Well, think about the end result being a book of some sort. You can always keep your subject near the center of the frame or have them take up pretty much the entire frame with little negative space. On top of all this, when you shoot vertically, you’re often thinking in a completely different way. When you shoot in landscape, you think to yourself, “Oh, I can crop this later.” But when you’re shooting vertically, you’re composing the scene in an arguably more intriguing way and often also trying to zoom in more on the main subject.
Trust me, if someone is viewing your image on a phone and they’re zooming in on the photo to see more of the details, then you probably should’ve cropped in more.
Here’s another thing to think about with bird photography: The eye of the bird doesn’t always need to be super sharp, and the main point of what’s in focus. Sometimes the body and the head are on the same plane of focus, and that doesn’t need to change