Taking Pics of Flying Birds

Something I've learned when taking pictures of birds in flight is that the hardest part isn't just aligning the camera to point to the bird. It's the camera's settings that make sure you can get a clear picture of the bird, especially when it's moving fast, like the first osprey flapping its wings as it's hovering. You need the shutter speed to be fast enough that the flapping won't look blurry. But that can make the picture dark because a fast shutter makes less light come in. So set things to let more light in like increasing the aperture and increasing the exposure, but don't do too much with the exposure especially when outside where the most powerful light source shines (the sun) if you get an overly exposed picture that's gonna to be hard to deal with in photoshop.

If you can't help but take a dark photo that's when my second photo-philosophy applies; Photoshop is your best friend. The third photo in my examples looked like a silhouette at first. But thanks to Photoshop the dark morphed Red-Tailed Hawk came out beautifully. Check out my other pictures and if you have any questions about how I take certain photos please ask away.