Suppose you want to include habitat as a second subject in a bird photo, but also want to keep your photo simple: what’s the minimum you need to capture? There isn’t a specific answer to that question, but it is something to keep in mind. Composing a photo is often a battle between simplicity and complexity. Too many details can be overwhelming, but oversimplifying can skip details that tell a story.

I think this photo brings in habitat as a second subject with a minimum of ornamentation. It tells us about the Gray Kingbird’s habit of perching in open spaces where it can spot flying insects to eat, and it tells us how comfortable this species is in urban areas. The crossed lines are a key part of the visual composition, drawing attention to them in a way that a single line doesn’t. I have many photos of birds on a line, and they really don’t seem to be about the line in the same way.

In addition to habitat in general being a second subject, specific phenomena can be a second subject, too. Below are a couple examples of photos that are about birds and also about the influx of sargassum that has hit the Caribbean several times in the last few years. This has been a significant occurrence, impacting both man and nature. Sargassum is important to shorebirds at the moment, and shorebirds help tell the story of sargassum and its impact.

There are plenty of other opportunities to combine birds with events or phenomena to create engaging images. Trees without leaves or dry pond beds can tell us about seasonal changes and unusual droughts. I wish I had spent more time photographing cattle egrets as they fed on grasshoppers trying to escape from this brush fire. The presence of a bird is really more evocative than photos of the flames themselves.

Sure, it’s obvious, but the easiest way to turn a bird’s habitat into the second subject of a photo is to zoom out and let the habitat fill the photo. The ratio of bird to habitat can send a strong signal about your intention for the photo. Below are two pairs of photos showcasing the same scene in a different way. When zoomed in to focus on the birds, you actually don’t see the pond (egret photo) or the mangroves (group of birds photo). When zoomed out, the individual birds can become very small. Sometimes one will be clearly stronger than the other. Sometimes both photos work, but for different reasons.

It’s also worth mentioning that it is really easy to get caught up in getting that perfect close-up shot of a bird. Often, that shot is the most powerful one you can get. But sometimes it’s worth it to zoom out and capture a broader perspective. Luckily, there’s no rule against doing both!

This week we look at habitat as a second subject in bird photos. Here’s the article from The Daily Herald’s Weekender, and we will also be posting additional thoughts and examples here on the blog throughout the week.

By human element, I am unfortunately not referring to actual people. I am talking trash. On St. Martin, it is a huge problem. There are obviously huge downsides to having litter all over the island that go beyond the inconvenience of having trash in the background of one’s bird photos. That said, having trash in the background of my bird photos drives me crazy. I’m already trying to get the right angle for the light and the background, must I also worry constantly about trash in my photos? Yes.

This Yellow-crowned Night Heron was doing something really cool looking in front of a background that really wasn’t great anyways. Still, the trash in the background is really vexing, particularly the plastic bottle at the bird’s neck. Once you notice it, it can’t be unseen.

It was amazing to see a Great Egret spear a tilapia and prepare to eat it. Apparently not a big fan of being photographed while eating, the egret walked in front of a PVC pipe, ensuring that all the photos would be ruined.

I took a bunch of photos of some Common Gallinule chicks and their mom. Most of the time, I struggled to keep garbage out of the frame, or confined to a corner where it could be cropped out. Sometimes, though, I think it is important to leave the styrofoam chunks and plastic bottles in the photo. After all, they were there.

In terms of practical advice, always keep an eye out for trash. It can be surprisingly easy to overlook in the moment when you are focused on a bird. If you can’t get trash out of the frame entirely, at least try to get it away from the bird, by moving your position or waiting for the bird to move on a bit. That way, if you do end up editing it out in Photoshop, your are working your editing magic in an area of the photo that isn’t the main focus of the image.

Backgrounds don’t have to be plain to be pleasing, but sometimes they’re just too busy to work. For example, the two photos below are similar in many ways. They both have a bird and quite a bit of vegetation, and the vegetation has a lot of detail. Aesthetically, though, the Glossy Ibis is lost while the young Snowy Egret is clearly the focus of the image.

In the case of these photos, I think there are two main differences. First, the vegetation in the ibis photo is closer in color and darkness to the bird itself. Second, the vegetation behind the ibis is closer, so it is more in focus. The egret clearly stands out from the vegetation, and the grass behind the egret’s head is more distant and blurry, allowing the detail of the egrets head to stand out.

Here are two images of a Spotted Sandpiper with a crab in its bill. I don’t think this one really needs a lot of comment. Its a fidgety, fast-moving bird, and even with the leaf, the image is less than ideal. Without the leaf, though, you really can’t tell what’s going on at all. It could be a break in the clouds or a spot of shadow, but when a background isn’t cooperating, keep an eye out for your yellow leaf. Alternately, if you’re doing your best just to track a moving subject, you can take a lot of photos and then sort through them afterwards for the background that works the best.

In addition to finding plain backgrounds to direct focus towards your subject, you can also use backgrounds that divide the scene into multiple spaces. Exactly how you divide the scene gets into questions of composition: how the scene is balanced, using the contrast in backgrounds to lead the viewer through the photo, etc. Without going down that road too far, I wanted to share some examples of backgrounds that divide a photo into different spaces.

The division between rocky coastline and the sea in this photo showcases the habitat of these Ruddy Turnstones, while also making them stand out. Also, you can imagine them being camouflaged, but they aren’t actually hidden in the photo.

A Laughing Gull stands on the pondfill sand near the Great Salt Pond. There’s a lot of contrast in this photo. The body of the gull stands out against the blue of the pond, while its feet stand out against the sand. (Note: The blue of the Great Salt Pond? Crazy, I know. It must have been some trick of the light.)

In this photo, piles of dry sargassum create a flowing band of sand around a Killdeer.

When using backgrounds to divide space, ideally you can create spaces that enhance the balance of the image and draw attention to the subject. You can see a clear difference in the two examples below. The Sandwich Tern seems to coast above the sloping hill (although the hill is actually far in the background), while the Great Egret is caught, a bit awkwardly, at the border of sky and hills.

It is worth noting that I am not at the ninja level of bird photography, anticipating when flying birds may align with distant hills. But, whether you are moving or your subject is moving, look out for angles that showcase a bird in the right spot on a divided background.

Plain backgrounds bring attention to the bird you’re photographing. There are definitely cases where background elements add to the photo, but there are also many in which busy backgrounds crowd and overwhelm the subject. For bird photos, especially in the Caribbean, sky and water are probably two of the most common plain backgrounds, but there are plenty of others if you look out for them.

A blue sky is visually pleasing, offers superb contrast, and, even when the subject is perching, reminds us that birds are creatures of the sky.

Cloudy skies, on the other hand, are usually not nearly as pleasing. They can also make it harder to get a good exposure when a dark bird is backed by a bright, white cloud. Sometimes it is possible to shoot from a different position so there is some blue sky behind the subject.

Water can be a fantastic background. Up close, it may be mostly plain, but with ripples that convey a sense of movement.

Water in the far background can blur into washes of color that give the background some texture.

Very still water can also provide a reflection of the subject, surrounded by otherwise empty space.

Vegetation can be relatively plain as well. In this example, much of the vegetation is out of focus, creating a soft green background. Even the parts that are in focus have a relatively consistent yellow-green color that contrasts well with the bird.

Solid stone backgrounds probably aren’t as easy to come by, but they can do a great job highlighting a subject.

Manmade backgrounds can work, too. This dove was walking along with a yellow building in the background. Urban settings often make for busy, distracting backgrounds, but there are exceptions, and they may include colors that aren’t so easy to find in the wild.

In this week’s column, we talk about backgrounds. Sometimes, at their best, they go unnoticed. As a photographer, paying attention to what’s behind your subject is key for many reasons. Enjoy the article from today’s Daily Herald Weekender, and follow along on the blog this week as we dig deeper!

As a bonus, here’s another shot of the turnstone on the pier in Grand Case:

We have focused primarily on natural light, which is usually the most practical light for bird photos. In some cases, however, using a flash can also be helpful. Normally it requires a strong flash used at a relatively close distance. Flash technique is a complex subject on its own, and one about which I know little, but here are a few cases where a flash can come in handy.

At night flash may be your only option. It may not give you a photo that you’ll treasure for its artistic merits, but you might want to document interesting nocturnal activity. It is probably worth mentioning that focusing in the dark can be tricky, and you may only have one shot before your subject flies away, so make it count!

During the day, at close range, a little bit of flash can be used to augment the natural light that is available. In this situation, the best result is usually a photo where it isn’t obvious that flash was used at all. This can be especially useful if your subject is backlit.

The reflection of the flash can highlight iridescence in a bird’s feathers. On St. Martin, this is particularly useful for our hummingbirds.

Different times of day provide different light. Sometimes these differences are so strong the viewer of a photo can instantly envision the time of day the photo was taken. Of course, don’t forget that in the early morning and evening hours the light is coming from the east or west, so plan your shooting location accordingly!

Around sunrise, the light is warm and soft.

In the midday sun, light can be bright and harsh, with strong contrasts and shadows.

Evening brings a return of warm colors.

Partial lighting can be a blessing or a curse. Often it is caused by strongly directional light, like the sun at midday, or light that is partially blocked by vegetation or other obstructions. It cause some areas of a photo to be over or under exposed, or at least make it challenging to get the right exposure. On the other hand, it can be used to create very interesting photos.

Partial lighting can make a subject stand out from the background.

Strong shadows can also highlight forms.

Small amounts of direct light can also function like spotlights, highlighting a bird or a part of a bird. They can also convey a sense of place, such as a shady forest pierced with small rays of light.

Taking bird photos on an overcast day can be a little tricky because you may not have as much light to work with. On the other hand, there can also be a few advantages.

Natural light on a cloudy day tends to be cooler, so it can really bring out rich greens and blues. This can be especially good for photos that include foliage. Cloudy conditions are essentially the opposite of the golden hour around sunrise and sunset when light is warmest.

On a cloudy day, shadows are weaker. This can be good or bad depending on the situation. Strong shadows can make for striking photos, but the even lighting on cloudy days means less worrying about over or under exposing parts of your photo.

Overcast days can also set the stage for some unusual images. The surface of this pond appears white because it is reflecting a cloudy sky. Birds themselves may also look or behave differently in different weather, and it is valuable to document this.

Silhouettes aren’t particularly useful for documenting wildlife, so they’re not something I have a lot of experience doing. Still, they can be something interesting to try when the lighting pretty much guarantees you can’t do anything else.

This snowy egret was walking right through the reflection of sunlight on a pond, a situation where there’s no way to get a “proper” photo of it. The result is a failed experiment. The execution isn’t great, but it does seem to show that it would be possible to a very interesting photo this way.

This immature grackle was photographed with just enough foreground light to create a regular portrait or a silhouette depending on the post-processing. It can be good to remember that an underexposed photo that can’t be “saved” as a traditional portrait might make a good silhouette.

Having the subject illuminated from behind can be a very nice effect. Out in the wild it can be tricky, compared to using backlighting in a studio setting where the photographer is controlling the light from light from all directions. The main benefit of backlighting is achieving a nice glow around the edge of the subject, and the main drawback is having most of the subject in the shade, sometimes making it difficult to see details.

Here are a few examples of backlighting. The cattle egret photo works the best, because the backlighting really brings out the details of the feathers around the head and creates a strong contrast with the dark background. There is also enough light to see the bird clearly.

The immature yellow-crowned night heron doesn’t gain as much from being backlit, but doesn’t really lose anything either.

The snowy egret with the small fish in its mouth loses quite a bit of detail and the backlighting doesn’t really make the image more appealing.

Overall, backlighting is fun to experiment and can achieve some very nice results, but it would take a better photographer than me to consistently use it to great effect.

Even if it’s just sunlight, you are using light with every photo you take. You’re also making decisions about how you use that light, whether you’re thinking about them or not. We delve into light in today’s Bird Watch SXM column, and all week on the blog.

Back in the day, before SD cards, cameras used a kind of memory stick that usually came in a little canister and they called it film. Different kinds of film had different speeds, indicating how much light it needed for exposure. “Faster” film required less light, but was grainier and “slow” film required more light but had better quality.

Today, digital cameras usually have a setting called ISO which controls the sensitivity of the sensor. Although the technology is totally different, the effect is the same. Lower ISO gives better image quality, using higher ISO lets you get photos in lower light (or with a faster shutter speed), but makes your images noisier.

ISO is one area in which cameras vary widely. Newer cameras are much better at taking decent images at higher ISO and cameras with small sensors, like point and shoot cameras, are often pretty bad (although also improving every year). For this reason, I can’t specify the proper ISO. In general, though, use low ISO if you can, and test your camera to see what ISO settings still produce usable images.

Also, keep in mind, if you are cropping an image, high-ISO noise will be much more noticeable, and if you do lots of adjustments to your photos on the computer, many of these, like sharpening, may make high-ISO noise even more apparent. And, of course, if you are making images primarily for sharing in low resolution online, noise from using a high ISO may not be visible at all.

I propose that aperture, the size of the hole where light is entering the camera, is the least important setting for this type of photography. Having a big opening lets lots of light in, which is great if you are only opening the shutter for a very short moment of time. However, there are some downsides to this.

First, most lenses are “soft” when you shoot them “wide open.” In normal speech, it means if you have the aperture open all the way, your images will not be as sharp. The best sharpness usually starts a couple “stops” smaller than the maximum.

Wider apertures also give less depth of field. Sometimes photographers limit the depth of field intentionally so only a small amount of the photo is in focus, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea for bird photography. For birds, it is often nice if the eye and the bill are both in focus. A very small depth of field also means that any slight error or movement and your subject may be out of that narrow in-focus band. Because of physics (optics specifically) cameras with smaller sensors, like any point and shoot camera, will have greater depth of field, so this is only really an issue for cameras with large sensors like DSLRs.

That said, one can get great photos even at the widest aperture. The loss of sharpness won’t be as much of a problem as blurriness from a photo with a shutter speed that is too slow. If I have enough light I will always try to shoot a few stops down, but this is the first thing I compromise when I don’t have enough light.

As a side note, the difference between the two images in this post is much easier to see at full size. This also means that if you are primarily taking photos to share online, the aperture you’re using probably won’t matter.

Of all the camera settings, shutter speed is probably the most important when you are zoomed in. Normally, when I’m photographing birds, I use shutter priority, meaning I set the shutter speed I want/need and let the camera adjust the aperture to get the right exposure. The shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter is open and light is reaching your camera sensor (or film). The faster the speed, the more you can freeze motion, either yours or your subject’s.

One rule of thumb is to have a shutter speed the inverse of the length of you lens in millimeters. By this measure, when I’m maxing out my zoom lens at 400mm, my shutter speed should be 1/400th of a second. Some cameras/lenses have image stabilization, which reduces the impact of your movement. This allows you to reduce your shutter speed if your subject isn’t moving.

You can figure out what shutter speed works for you with a little bit of testing. When you look at an image, if everything is blurry, that’s your motion. If only your subject is blurry, that’s probably their motion. Find the shutter speed that lets you consistently take clear photos when zoomed in.

If it freezes your motion and the motion of your subject, why not just use a super fast shutter speed all the time? A fast shutter speed doesn’t let in much light, so you need a bright day or you need to adjust your aperature and ISO to get a good exposure. Although the other settings are not necessarily as crucial, they are also important, as we will find out.

The zooming is an important part of bird photography, and this week in the Bird Watch column and here on the blog, we take a look at how to get the best photos when you are using your zoom.

I would say it’s a rare problem, but sometimes you can be too close! In this photo of a Lesser Antillean Bullfinch, I was focused on getting sharp detail in her face and didn’t even realize her legs and tail were being cut off. It seems like a silly mistake, but it’s rare that a bird is spilling out of the frame, especially a small one. For most of my bird photos I’m doing at least some cropping on the computer. I guess lesson here is that even though getting close may be the most important task facing a bird photographer, you can’t afford to ignore the other aspects of your shot.

It’s an obvious tip, but it works. If you are having trouble getting close enough to little birds, try taking photos of big birds, like pelicans, frigatebirds and egrets. You can take photographs from five times as far when you’re photographing a bird that’s five times as big as another bird. This is probably one of the reasons why there are so many photos of iguanas on St. Martin even though most of the other lizards on the island are much more interesting in many ways.

Even though getting close to birds usually requires being as inconspicuous and unthreatening as possible, sometimes curiosity can work in your favor. This juvenile Yellow-crowned Night Heron definitely noticed me, and was scoping me out pretty intently. For the photographer, this is a much better situation that a bird flying away immediately, but it is still best to move slowly lest you tip the balance between curiosity and fear.

For songbirds, there is a technique called pishing, which is mimicking bird calls to attract birds. There are a few theories why it works. The “pish” sound (and various other ones) may sound like an alarm call given when a predator is noticed, or a distress call from a young bird. Whatever the exact reason, a variety of small birds, like the Yellow Warbler below, will come to investigate this sound. If other people see you doing this you may seem a bit strange, but it can be a great way to get close-up shots of birds that are otherwise hard to see.

There are many different reasons why you might want to photograph a group of birds. Sometimes you just can’t get close enough to make a compelling photo of a single bird, but you can get something good by featuring multiple birds in the same photo. Four Short-billed Dowitchers make for a nice photo even at a distance where a single one would be a bit skimpy.

Even just adding a second bird lets you zoom out a bit on a composition that would otherwise have too much empty space, as you can see with the pair of American Coots, a species that is often difficult to approach.

When you are photographing a group or pair—because you’re too far away or for any reason—you do want to figure out which individual bird is the focal point of the photo. In most cases, only one bird is going to be fully in focus, and usually it’s the closest one to you. There are exceptions. Sometimes the biggest or most interesting bird is in the background and should be the focal point, and sometimes you can get a good focus on multiple birds. If the birds are moving, the “star” of the shot may be changing quickly.

The first column in the Bird Shots series for Bird Watch SXM in The Daily Herald’s Weekender focuses on getting close to birds. As you can see in this photo, nature often provides an impromptu bird blind at the right moment. In this case, it was a group of trees. Partially hidden, it was possible to get pretty close to this juvenile Yellow-crowned Night Heron.

In this situation, one has the option to shoot through the vegetation, use the vegetation to get close before stepping out for a clear shot, or doing both. I would recommend at least trying a few shots while partially obstructed by vegetation. Practically-speaking, stepping out to get the clear shot may scare the bird off before you get any clear shots. Shooting through vegetation can also be used to create interesting compositions, and to showcase important aspects of a bird’s habitat. Both these topics will be covered in later articles. For now, it’s enough to mention that the partially-obstructed views you have when sneaking up on birds can sometimes be used to capture photos that are more interesting than the average bird portrait.

For the Bird Watch SXM column in The Daily Herald’s Weekender, I am starting a series on bird photography. The first article came out today and I will try to post some additional tips on the blog here between articles. Also, if you don’t get The Daily Herald, there is a mostly complete archive of Bird Watch SXM columns online here: http://www.sxmwildlife.com/publications/journalism/.

Also, since newsprint loses some of the detail, here’s the heron photo from the article: