The moment you get anywhere close enough to get a good shot, you better have yourself ready to shoot because it probably won’t be long before the bird or duck gets uncomfortable and scoots out of your shooting distance. Photos by Chad Eckloff

Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography!

Last week I shared some tips from my own experiences that could help you get some shots of birds and waterfowl as they are starting to arrive back in our area for spring. I had some great feedback and a few questions that I wanted to share with you to expand a little on shooting these friends of ours. I’d also like to share some photos of ducks from behind the BPU.

My fellow photog, Don, wrote in and wanted me to expand on shooting without having the camera on manual and touch a bit on shooting birds with a phone or tablet or other mobile device. As always, I love when I get feedback like this. It helps me to open up my mind a little and explore the things I left out in previous articles.

First, let’s talk about shooting without the camera in manual mode. When Don wrote in he mentioned putting the camera into the Scene mode and utilizing one of the scene settings. Scenes are settings that are optimized for particular shooting scenarios. For example, you may have a scene mode that is represented by an icon of a snowman. This would be the perfect mode for shooting outdoors in a bright, snowy setting where there’s going to be a lot of reflected white light. Portrait mode will optimize the settings to make a nice portrait shot with a blurred background. Night mode will increase the camera sensor’s sensitivity and set up for a low-lit shot. Don mentioned the “running man” scene mode in his email. This one is usually represented by an icon of a man running and is meant for shooting fast moving action. By putting your camera in this mode, you’ll already be most of the way toward getting a great shot of birds as they are moving about. This scene mode will set your camera’s shutter speed very fast depending on what you are metering in the shot. In theory, you should be able to capture a bird or a duck if it’s flying by or coming in for a landing. I haven’t tried this, but I’d love to hear your experience with it.

The other part of his request was to talk about shooting with a smartphone or other mobile device. I must say, I hadn’t even considered this as I see way too many issues with using a smartphone to try to capture anything that is moving faster than a walking speed. But, I decided to take my smartphone down behind the BPU and give it a try. The first thing I did was just point and shoot and see what I got. Of course, the ducks are all swimming by at the far side of the river from where was standing. So, as they were drifting by, I zoomed in on them by using the swipe action to activate the digital zoom feature. This brings me to my first problem; distance limitations. When using the smartphone, you’re going to have to get up close to the subject. This means you’ve got to have a really good trust relationship going with these birds. The moment you get anywhere close enough to get a good shot, you better have yourself ready to shoot because it probably won’t be long before the bird or duck gets uncomfortable and scoots out of your shooting distance. If you try to use the zoom feature on your phone you’re going to find out really fast what the difference is between “optical zoom” and “digital zoom.”

Optical zoom is when your camera utilizes lenses to achieve a zoom, such as in the case of digital cameras with either fixed lenses that move in and out or interchangeable lenses. Digital zoom is when the camera or smartphone uses software to enlarge the image on the sensor to achieve a zoom. Digital zoom is always going to be terrible compared to optical zoom.

The second problem I ran into was trying to track the ducks as they were flying by. Because I’m holding the phone up in front of me and looking at the screen, I find that I have a harder time tracking than if I was holding a camera with my eye in the eyepiece and tracking the old-fashioned way. Also, even if I had the phone tracking a fly-by, I couldn’t quite get the camera to take a clean and sharp shot. I went in and manually set the shutter speed, aperture and ISO to what I thought would give me the shot and it always ended up blurry. No matter how fast I pushed the camera, I still got the same results.

Maybe it’s just me and the fact that I have no experience shooting wildlife with a phone, but I’m baffled how anyone could do it. However, if you do some searching on the Internet, you’ll find many topics, articles, and videos showing how others have achieved some pretty great shots with smartphones. There’s even a guide or two out there that will help you with making this happen on your smartphone. I’d start with the guide on the Audubon site as it has some great information which you can read by visiting this page: http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2016/how-photograph-birds-smartphone. It even includes a topic on connecting your phone to a digi-scope (a.k.a. field scope or telescope) to get great distance shots. It’s worth mentioning that the photos with this article were not shot on a smartphone, but rather with my Sony DSLR and a 70-200mm lens.

Another photo friend, Jimmy, wrote in and asked about using flash to help capture the motion of the birds in flight. This is a good way to help get the shots but there’s a few things to consider. If you’re flash is attached to your camera then you’re going to be forced to shoot at the shutter speed that is the “sync” speed of your flash and camera. In most cases, that speed is 1/250th of a second. As I mentioned last week, I was shooting ducks in flight at 1/1250th of a second. To achieve speeds like this you’re going to have to utilize High Speed Sync (HSS) which means you’ll need a flash that can be triggered off camera. And, to light up the birds from a comfortable distance, this might also mean you’ll need a very high powered flash such as a studio flash, or you’ll have to use a flash extender to focus the power of your light such as a Better Beamer Flash Extender will do. Google it and you’ll find all sorts of tips on shooting birds with a flash if that’s the route you’d like to go.

Thanks for the great feedback! I love when I get to interact with those of you reading my thoughts on photography.

Until next week, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.