Camera settings for birds in flight

Recently a client wrote and told me, after seeing my shots of birds from Bosque del Apache during my photo tour there last month, that she’s never been able to take sharp pictures of birds in flight. She asked me to help her with camera settings for this very challenging aspect of action photography, so this article is my answer to her.

First and foremost, the shutter has to be extremely fast. I use 1/3200th of a second for most of the bird species I photograph. If the bird is small, thereby its wings beat especially fast, I will use 1/4000th if I have enough light. This guarantees sharp wing tips.

If the light gets low and a super fast shutter forces a very high ISO, then just know, if you slow down the shutter, you will definitely get blur. I would prefer to raise the ISO (even to dizzying heights like 40,000) and then in post-processing do my best with software like Topaz De Noise and Neat Image to mitigate the noise.

For large birds like eagles, vultures, hawks, macaws, osprey, etc., I’ll use shutter speeds as low as 1/2000th of a second if reduced ambient light is present. Their graceful wings don’t move as fast as those of smaller birds.

Birds have depth. Since long lenses are used almost exclusively to photograph birds in flight, depth of field is, by defintion, shallow. I got very tired of seeing only parts of the bird in focus while other parts were soft. The reason we photograph all aspects of nature is to show all the stunning detail. Many birds have magnificient colors and patterns, a compelling face and beak, and elegant tail feathers. To show them out of focus, in my opinion, misses the whole point of taking nature pictures.

That’s why I rarely shoot wide open. I usually use f/11 and, if there is enough light, I prefer f/16 (but most of the time there isn’t enough light for such a small lens aperture).

I set the ISO to auto, and the exposure mode to manual. This allows me to specifically choose the shutter speed (so it doesn’t vary according to the light) and, at the same time, specifically choose the lens aperture (again, without it varying per the light).

The only downside to this is the ISO may become higher than you’d want. My rationale for accepting exceptionally high ISO is I’d rather have noise than a blurred picture. That’s the tradeoff: A

fast shutter with high ISO or a blurred bird. Noise can be dealt with by using Topaz DeNoise AI (now incorporated into Topaz Photo AI) and Neat Image software. Both of these programs do a remarkable job in mitigating noise. The snowy owl above is an example. I was using auto ISO late in the day in Canada during the winter and the light was waning. I hadn’t noticed the ISO had become 12,800, but my settings were exactly where I wanted them -- 1/3200 and f/11. In post-processing, I used Neat Image software and it eliminated the noise almost completely.

The ability of modern cameras, and especially the mirrorless models, to deal with noise -- and then for software programs to further aid in producing high quality images -- means bird photographers can have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, even in low light, we can use fast shutter speeds to render every aspect of a bird in flight tack sharp. If I know I’ll be capturing birds in flight against a monochrome sky, like with the sandhill cranes, below, I turn all of the focus points on. There is nothing in the background to fool the autofocus mechanism. However, if the birds will be flying in front of trees or other natural features in a landscape, I use a small, centered cluster of focus points. In my camera body, that’s typically 4 or 9 central points. If I can keep the bird in the center of the frame, then I can depend on getting a sharp picture.

The new technology that finds an eye in the frame and locks onto it is remarkably accurate. I use it whenever possible. On my Canon R5, I’ve assigned this feature to one of the back buttons near where my thumb rests so I can switch back and forth easily between eye tracking and normal autofocus.

In conjunction with that, I shoot birds in flight with the fastest frame rate available to me, which is now 20 fps. This allows me to capture every nuance in the wing positions as the birds soar, fly, take off, and land.

Those few milliseconds that yield the best bird in flight pictures are when the birds take off and land. It is at these times when they have to furiously contort their wings to make flight happen or to arrest their forward motion. This action happens so quickly our brains simply can’t freeze-frame what actually happens. We never see the grace and beauty of the wing formations; only the camera can capture it.

That’s why I spend a lot of time looking through the viewfinder at nests and frequently used perches, waiting for a bird to take off or land. And many water birds seem like acrobats when they run on the water to get lift-off or when they make a splash landing. These are the moments that make truly awesome photographs. §