In December I took a lot of baby portraits for friends and gain some reputation in this field but my favourite models are still birds. Unfortunately I don´t live in Florida, New Mexico or Canada where thousands of flamingos, pelicans, herons, bald eagles and many others waiting with great patience to be photographed. A land of milk and honey.

In Austria there are just a few points where birds gether in bigger numbers. The best of all by far ist the Neusiedlersee NP. It´s my favourite place to take bird pictures. Bad thing is that almost all birds are just travelers on a stopover on their way north. Therefore highseason is very limited and starts at mid of March till end of May. The rest of the year there is almost no chance to take good images of birds with just one exception: If you feed birds in winter you will get photo opportunities you won´t find in the wild ( if you don´t have the privelege to live in one of the bird photography sweet spots mentioned above ).

If you have a garden simple set up a ( cat save ) bird feeder and start feeding when it gets cold to get the birds used to it. Never stop feeding during a season because if the birds are used to your feeding station they rely on it. Just make sure that you exclude the feeder in the image by taken pictures of the birds on a perch near the feeder instead. More information can be found in the HOW TO section for birdphotography.

The image above was not taken near a feeder. I feed the sparrows in the zoo with some walnuts I had in my pockets. Though you may find sparrows almost everwhere it´s not as simple as it looks to get a good closeupshot of them. Closeup means that I was close to the lens MFD ( minimum focus distance ) - in case of the 70-200VR that is 1.5 meters. Being close means that the DOF ( depth of field ) is really narrow. If there is enough light it would be best to stop down to f5.6 or even f8 to gain more DOF but you seldom have enough light to do so in winter. If I take images of sparrows, tits or other small, fast moving birds I prefer ar least 1/500s to freeze motion. 1/1000s would be better but isn´t possible most of the time. In this case a got only a meager 1/300 at f2.8 and for the shot above it was only 1/160s at f4. I stopped dwon to f4 to get eyes, bill and feet in focus. You can´t stop any motion with this speed and so a lot fo images turned out blurred. Though it would make life much easier to use a flash for this kind of shooting I prefer images taken in natural light.

settings: A-Mode, 300mm equ., 1/160s at f4, Exp. -0,5, WB: cloudy-3