Page 21 - Backyard Bird Photography: How to Attract Birds to Your Home and Create Beautiful Photographs

of another Scrub Jay perched on the platform feeder, with a peanut in his beak. Without

the stalk in the background, this image would be far less intriguing.

Allen’s Hummingbird at Mexican sage
One day in April, I captured an image of the female Black-chinned Hummingbird as she
approached the flower head of a bottlebrush plant while hovering alongside it. I had been
photographing the Allen’s Hummingbird at the hummingbird feeder just a few feet away,

and I suddenly realized that there were a number of hummingbirds flying around the
bottlebrush flowers. I quickly moved the tripod and camera over to this area of the garden
and managed to take a naturalistic photograph right in my own backyard. On another
occasion, I took a photograph of the Black-chinned Hummingbird with her beak and part
of her head poked into a fuchsia flower.

And later that spring, I had a wonderful run of photographing the Allen’s
Hummingbird hovering alongside the Mexican sage on the canyon side of the pool. It was

a challenge to keep up with the fast-moving bird as it poked its beak into each flower, but I
concentrated and pressed the shutter at just the right moment on a number of occasions.
Late one afternoon, I decided to photograph the hummingbird into the sun, which
resulted in an evocative image of a backlit Allen’s Hummingbird feeding at the Mexican
sage.

I hope these examples show you that you can use your imagination and be creative with
the composition of the bird photographs that you take in your garden. All of these aspects

of composition are personal, and you should choose the styles that suit you best. In
general, your backyard should present you with a good variety of settings in which to take
your bird photographs, and you should feel free to take advantage of each of these
opportunities.