Photographing Birds in Flight

Here are our Top-15 tips for Shooting Birds in Flight...

If you have a small lens such as a 300 f4, 300 F2.8, 80-400 zoom or even the 200-400 zoom, handholding is comfortable. When not shooting keep your arms down to avoid arm-fatigue! The much heavier super telephotos such as the 400mm f2.8, 500mm f4 and 600mm f4 are extremely difficult to handhold.

2. You need a steady left hand (if you are right-handed), which you place under the lens barrel to support the lens. If your lens has a tripod collar either remove it or swivel it around so that it sits on top of the lens, out of your way.

3. When tracking the flying bird keep your panning motion smooth to ensure good focus and composition.

4. If the bird is far away than set the lens focus distance to the furthest setting in order to reduce the AF search time and to speed up focus acquisition.

5. Start focusing on the bird while it is still small in the frame. Don't wait until the bird is close to you otherwise you will waste time with 'focus hunting' and by then the bird is gone.

6. If you use a zoom lens, acquire the bird using the wide setting and zoom-in to fill the frame once you have the bird in focus.

8. Use Continuous Servo auto focus mode, which will allow you to track your subject and maintain focus as it flies.

9. Use Continuous high speed (CH) release mode, which allows you to shoot up to 6 frames per second with the Nikon D7000 and D300 and between 9 -11 frames with the D3s, depending on whether you are using full frame or crop.

Keep in mind that the bird will be flapping its wings and some shots will have the wing covering the face, the eyes may be closed, some shots will be out of focus and so forth. By shooting such high frame rates you will get a few that are in focus, with good exposure and composition!

11. You will lose focus as the bird is flying so gently pump the shutter button to reacquire focus while tracking the bird

12. When the bird starts getting large in the frame and you have it in focus that's when you depress the shutter button and start getting photographs!

14. Shoot at high shutter speeds - in the region of 1/1750 sec and remember that smaller birds will fly faster than bigger birds

15. On overcast days you can shoot all day but just add more light to your exposure - anything from 1 to 3 stops more, depending on how overcast the day is.

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