http://www.alldigi.com/

Butterfly

This beautiful butterfly has been captured with a close up macro lens.

A macro lens is excellent for this type of photography to get so close to the subject.

There are many different tips on Macro Photography here, including lens selection and helping you get the best from your close up lenses.

Mudlark

This Mudlark has been captured with a 300mm telephoto lens. I love using telephoto lenses and their use in producing sharp images does take quite a lot of technique and practice.

The critical factor is keeping the lens and camera combination steady. If I am not using a tripod or monopod, I try to rest the lens on one of my arms as I steady the camera. Bird images  need to be very sharp so that you can see the feather details and a steady camera/lens is critical.

There are many different lenses to choose from and the cost can vary considerably with the quality of telophoto lenses. There are some reviews and discussion on both Nikon and Canon lenses and also cameras here.

With bird photography there is also an advantage in using a camera with a high pixel density, the higher pixel density will enable you to crop images more than you would normally. Due to difficulty in getting close to birds, cropping can give a great advantage, provided the sharpness can still be retained.

Butcher Bird

When photographing birds a long lens is required. For the above image I used a Nikon 300mm f/4 lens.

There are a great selection of lenses available for bird photography. If you sheet Nikon there are many long lenses to choose from and if you shoot Canon there are also a great range of telephoto lenses.

No matter what equipment you use,  lenses with low apertures are always better due to their low light capability, however low aperture telephoto lenses are always extremely expensive.

This magpie lark has been captured with a 300mm telephoto lens, a focal length of 300mm is excellent for birds, but sometimes even longer lenses can be of advantage. We have reviewed several long lenses suitable for use with birds on the All Digital Photography site and there is quite a lot of general photography information. 

Another bird photography post.

Silver Gull

The photography of a bird such as the above requires a camera with a very fast shutter speed. It can be a little overwhelming to review all the functionality when you are selecting a camera. If you are a dedicated photographer then it can be very important to determine the best camera for your use.

There are quite a few sites which summarise the details of cameras and I believe a couple of the good ones are Nikon Camera Review site where many Nikon cameras are reviewed.

In general there is not a lot of difference between these two camera brands but thoroughly evaluate before you purchase.

Owl

The above image was captured a few years ago when I was using film, remember film, it was wonderful.

The selection of a suitable lens for your photography can greatly enhance your photographic results by enabling you to get much closer to your subject, by using a long telephoto lens or by using a wide angle lens and getting a wider view in you frame.

Rainbow Bee-eater

This image was captured at Eighty Mile Beach Western Australia using a Nikon D700 and 300mm lens.

http://www.alldigi.com/

Generally bird photography requires quite long focal length lenses, however the photography of larger birds can be done with much shorter lenses and is consequently much easier and cheaper to do.

Larger birds are often easier to photograph as the tend to move around much less and offer more opportunities to capture them  A big bird can provide you with many options for framing the shot too.  You might like to focus on framing the whole bird or alternatively just the bird’s head for a closer shot.

Although you might not find Sesame Street’s Big Bird flying about, you can find a great variety of large birds to photograph.  For example, the; pelican, crane, jabiru, emu, bald eagle, flamingo, condor, bustard and you’ll find many more that habitat in your local area.

Lenses in the focal length range 300 to 600mm are considered the ideal lens for birds. There is a good summary of the range of telephoto lenses in the Nikon lens reviews section here. When using long telephoto lenses, be careful of camera shake and do everything to keep the camera steady.