My First Attempt at Wildlife Photography!
So, I’ve been doing photography for maybe thirteen years now, and I would probably call myself a ‘photographer’ for maybe the last five. And I’ve worked and shot in so many styles; portraiture, landscape, product, surrealist, architecture,… the list goes on…
But one style I have never really tried, in all my years holding a camera almost every day of my life, was wildlife and nature photography. There’s a number of reasons why I never tried it, the main probably being that a decent telephoto lens with a fast aperture will set you back £10k+ depending what focal length you intend to work with! That and also its very time consuming. It required patience, specific conditions and maybe a little bit of know-how wouldn’t go a miss!
Now, in the last Thirteen years, I’ve not had a spare ten thousand pounds of disposable income to buy the lens, I live in the UK, so the weather usually sits around the ‘its grey and damp’ condition and my know how was… well… limited (in every field). Also being the undiagnosed ADHD kid, I had next to no patience at all. I wanted to go out, get that photo, edit it, all in the same day to get that serotonin kick!
Roll forward to the ancient age of 24, Things have changed! I Have more time, I have a tad more patience than I used to and my knowledge of animals and nature is a thousand times better. Im still broke… But I work with cameras every day and conveniently the company I work for has an L series Canon 300mm f2.8, with tele-extenders that I can borrow occasionally. I also still live in the UK, but I now know that grey overcast days can be good for wildlife photography! So, I have all the components to shoot birds now!
So! The important part, the Kit!
I used my Canon R6. It has a rapid shutter speed of 20fps (electronic shutter) so I am able to burst fire at a fast moving subject and (hopefully) capture the action in crisp sharp detail! Also the full frame CMOS sensor is super sharp. Although its only 20mp, it has Never let me down at this point!
I paired this with the Canon EF 300mm f2.8 IS II USM, along with the Canon 2x Teleconverter, I think it was the Mk-II. Obviously I also had to use an RF-EF lens mount converter. This made for a stupidly large and heavy camera system…
Now, one thing I only recently learnt about; when using a tele converter, it does extend your focal range, but it also limits the maximum aperture by a factor, depending on which converter you use:
In basic terms, if you use the 1.4x, it knocks your maximum F stop down by one stop, and the 2x, it takes it down by two stops.
So I used the 2x tele converter, which meant that my f2.8, super fast 300mm lens, became a 600mm f5.6. This wasn’t detrimental, since I was shooting during the day, and I also had a full frame camera, so I could punch up the ISO a lot to compensate with the darker scenes I shot.
But that’s enough about backstory and gear. I decided to go out during the festive perineum (as I’ve started calling it because of Georgie…) and go to two locations to shoot over about three days. I knew that this project would be a long one so I set enough time to at least hopefully get a few photos! I didn’t really go out with an aim to capture a specific creature, which I would later realise would have been useful!
So day one:
I went to Ashridge Estate in Hertfordshire, just down the road from my parents house. This estate is more or less just woodland and fields and preserved nature spots, so perfect to try and capture some birds! Specifically smaller birds that won’t be affected by predators at this time of year!
I got up bright an early, it was a sunny day (perfect for that f5.6 compensation with the teleconverter!) and freezing cold. Which did make me worry about whether any birds would be out and about. I walked around for maybe three hours, and managed to get three useable photos… But for some reason, I wasn’t mad about that. I was so relaxed from strolling around in nature looking up at the trees, I didn’t care that I only got three photos… I got one of a nice little robin, and one of what looks like some sort of tree sparrow? Maybe? Im not 100% sure. And a couple of squirrels who were busy playing in the trees! But for a first attempt, I was quite proud! I went for clean edits as I usually do, I think they work quite nicely!
The next two days were spent in the Verulamium park in St Albans. Although very public, and mainly just consists of common waterfowl such as ducks, geese and swans in the man made lake, I did remember seeing a Kingfisher hunt in the river that runs past the lake. I knew that I had to at least try get a photo, worst case, I could get some nice photos of ducks!
So for these days I decided to ditch the tripod. I was using a geared head, which is amazing for stills and portraiture, but absolutely useless when shooting fast moving subjects. A gimbal head would have been better suited for this, but unfortunately I don’t own one!
So walking around on the first day, it was very damp and drizzly. I managed to capture these couple of shots, which I’m not amazed by, but they are nice, and a good starting point, especially whilst I was walking around looking for my kingfisher subject, to which I didn’t find on the first day!
The second day was mostly uneventful, a couple of swans, geese, and towards the end of the day, after many hours of watching and waiting for the kingfisher that would never show up, I got interested in a particular subject; ducks washing their feathers. It is this fantastic, wild, explosive splashing and thrashing of wings in the water to get dirt and dust out from under their feathers! Its normally quite fast and not really looked at but I thought id try capturing it with the high frame rate the camera can capture in!
It meant waiting around until you saw a duck dive under water, quickly aim and focus on it, and just fire off a tonne of shots whilst tracking this thrashing duck in the water whilst servo auto focus is doing its best to remain locked on! And 99.9% of the shots were just splashes and blurs that don’t really resemble much, but one shot I got, one shot made it out of the 3/400 I might have captured on those days. And I think after the edit, I am quite pleased with how it turned out! its sharp enough to show off whats going on, but still maintains the motion of the thrashing Mallard.
A Thrashing Female Mallard
Shooting wildlife and nature with a goal in mind definitely made the day more rewarding. As much as I loved walking around in nature aimlessly looking for birds and animals, having the aim of capturing a kingfisher, and then realising that was probably not going to happen, and changing that to capturing a duck cleaning its feathers mid action, gave me something specific to look out for. Something that I knew if I captured on those days, id be happy with what I had photographed at the end of the day, rather than being disappointed with capturing a generic set!
I think I will continue looking into nature and wildlife photography, since, after some research, budget friendly lens options that are almost identical, if not better than the lens I was using on these days, but a fraction of the cost! The Sigma 150-600mm f5.6-6.3 is an option at only £1099. Maybe ill look into that a little more and plan some more “nature days” to capture photos of some more birds in action.
Bonus Photo:
