Page 16 - Backyard Bird Photography: How to Attract Birds to Your Home and Create Beautiful Photographs

California Quail
The key to success in this situation is keeping perfectly still, with my eye looking
through the eyepiece, before the hummingbird arrives. With my shutter finger hidden
underneath my hat, the hummingbird detects virtually no movement from me, so that his
only distraction will be the sound of the shutter each time I take a picture. Once he gets

used to this sound he will perch with some degree of regularity (however brief those visits
may be) and I can shoot away. This is not as easy as it sounds, but it can be done if you are
very still and very patient. You may have to stand in one spot for a few hours or longer to
get a ten-second visit from the hummingbird—and then you have to get the shot. But after
all, that’s part of the challenge of backyard bird photography.

I revisited this technique in the summer of 2013 in Los Angeles with the Allen’s
Hummingbird, using the 180mm macro lens and the 1.4x teleconverter, just as I had done

years earlier. In this shoot, which took about a week, I started at four feet away from the
hummingbird, and I managed to get a really neat portrait of him just as his head was
turned toward me with an inquisitive look on his face. Over the next few days, I took a
number of other macro photographs of this hummingbird, from 3¾ feet and even from as
close as three feet away.

As you can see from these examples, while the technique of moving gradually toward a

bird can be successful for reducing the distance between you and your subject, you can
also stay in one place and let the birds come to you. This works not only with
hummingbirds, but with other species of birds.

For instance, the California Quail is an extremely wary species and he runs about as fast
as he can fly. Try to get close to a quail by walking up to him. It’s impossible. But many
times I have been sitting on my stool photographing the ground-feeding birds in my
garden when, usually in the late afternoon, I’ll hear from the bushes the familiar guttural

call of the quail as they move into my yard.

I sit perfectly still, bending forward with my eye in the viewfinder and wait for the quail
to move into the frame of my shot. Often, they will walk up to about six feet away from
me, the males communicating with the females the entire time.