Taking Photos of Birds in Flight

I love watching birds flying through the sky, floating on the air currents. One of the most common sites in our area are the Turkey Vultures riding the thermals above where the student pilots fly their Cessna trainers. These huge birds sometimes gather in such great numbers they look like they are flying in formation, but generally they just find these towering cumulonimbus clouds and draft off the heat rising from the ground. It is very hypnotic.

When you see them so high up it looks like you are watching a slow motion video of the most effortless and majestic flight. Of course they look much better up there than they do on the ground flapping around like a clumsy elephant with wings trying to get away from the bumper of your car before being smashed to oblivion.

Traditional *Bird Photography* is a difficult genre to master and often requires a decent investment in longer lenses. It's very similar to aviation photography, one of my long time photography passions, but without the security hassles. However, poetic images of birds flying through nature (speck-birds I call them) can be done with just a cell phone.

I'm not talking about full frame closeups like this Great Blue Heron I shot in Gulf Shores, or Auburn's Bald Eagle or Golden Eagle, or even something tiny like when we hand fed Ruby Throat Hummingbirds. Those are awesome too, but I'm talking about images that happen in a split second when you look up at the sky and see the contrast of a dark flutter of wings or group of birds flying effortlessly against a bright colored sky.

Taking Photos of Birds

Perhaps the point is obvious, perhaps not, but anyone can take birds flying through the sky with the camera they have in their pocket. That's the great thing about capturing birds in flight. You can use your iPhone (or whatever phone is in your pocket) and take wider angle shots like the Canadian Geese at the top of this post. In fact, by default a cellphone is going to take a wide angle shot and expose for the sky all on its own. The birds generally being a much darker color than the sky are going to silhouette against the sky automatically.

I didn't take all these shots in this post with my iPhone of course, but the one below I did, and I really like the silhouette of the crow against the green waters of the Gulf. Give it a try some time and see what you get. The Canadian Geese at the top of the page here gave me a heads up, I could hear them coming about 15 seconds or so before they arrived overhead. Most of the time, you just have to keep your eyes pointed towards the sky and see what you can see.

Try to include something else in the frame other than just birds and sky, even just a tree branch will give it some context (see the shot below with the power lines). You can use trees, clouds, sun, or colors to frame the birds. Anything works for framing as long as it has some contrast. The Canadian Geese in the V formation with the one on its own makes for a great diagonal line framed in by the trees.

Examples of Birds in Flight

Something occurred to me while reviewing the images for this post. I know today you can just mask in birds or have them generated into a sky using AI or even simple Lightroom techniques. It's pretty easy to do at this point. Especially when you are talking about small birds in flight like the ones above. But that isn't my thing. So for those interested in the AI photography space, if I took the image, the birds you see there actually existed as they are seen in the photo. I know the AI world is a disruptive one (positive and negative) on multiple levels, but it doesn't exist in my own photography. Editing, yes. AI generated subjects that didn't originally exist when I triggered the shutter button, no.

Trying to determine what is real and what isn't is an entirely different post so I'll save that one for later. If you have some bird images, post a link to them below and share them with everyone!

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