Many birders I see these days are walking around with a camera or grabbing their cell phones to line up that bird that just popped out of the bushes.  Some of these sightings make me cringe—shooting into the sun, chimping (google it!) after every shot, standing like a statue despite the bird moving and changing positions.  If your intention is simply to document what you see, that’s great, but stop reading right now.

But also please note the title of this article is not Camera 101.  I learned bird photography by the seat of my pants, making every possible mistake multiple times.  Because I’m neither technically inclined nor manually adept, if I had taken Camera 101 my eyes would have glazed over after a few pages.  What I’d like to do in this article is shorten the learning curve for birders who’d like to hang stuff on their wall.

Below I’ve listed ten things for birders with cameras (as opposed to photography nerds who have suddenly discovered birds are photogenic) to digest, and I’ve salted the article with four photos hanging on my wall, each illustrating one of these key ideas.  These ideas are only loosely sequential, and I consider all of equal importance.

Camera School Once A Month—This is as close to Camera 101 as I will go.  Every camera has tens, if not hundreds, of special settings, only a dozen or so that you’ll ever use.  Read your camera manual with your camera in your hands, making sure you understand everything it can do and why you might want to do it.  Repeat this exercise once a month, religiously, to fix your mistakes and broaden your capabilities.

Study Your Losers—If you’re getting excited about your bird photography, blowing a good shot should be a bigger disappointment than not even seeing the bird.  After you’ve studied your really bad images and figured out what just happened, make a folder in your computer and save them.  Refer back to them often.  It’s humbling, good for some laughs, and the best learning tool you’ll ever have.

Keep A Notebook—You did this in school, right? Do it now, too!.  Record the shoot in a general way—date, time, location, weather, species, etc.  Then, take the time to make entries after each image or series you shoot—mode, f/stop, ISO, shutter speed, and leave room to enter how each shot came out after you’ve seen it on the computer.  Sounds tedious and time consuming, and you just want to go out and shoot, but this is how you learn from your losers and improve mistakes.

Focus Trumps Everything—I still hear people say they focus manually because they wear glasses or because those little twigs fool their auto focus.  PLEASE!  Use auto focus and get it on the bird’s eye.  If the eye is sharp, no one will notice the tail.  If the tail is sharp but the eye isn’t, they’ll wonder why you spent so much money on a crummy camera.

Find Your Muse—I still struggle with some aspects of photography, most notably exposure, but my strength is that I know what a good photo looks like because I’ve looked at so many..  Before I knew what f/stop meant or how to spell aperture, I was poring over David Meunch and Art Wolfe.  I wanted my stuff to look like theirs.  Find a photographer you admire and look at everything they’ve done.

Study Your Subject—If you’re calling yourself a “birder,” you have books that will tell you everything you should know about plumage, behavior, habitat, seasonality, etc.  The more you know the better your photography will get because you’ll be at the right place at the right time, knowing what species will be there and what they might be doing.

Point Your Shadow At The Bird—This is at once the simplest but most important technical aspect for bird shooters.  Make it second nature.  Direct light pops details and enhances color.  There are times when you may have to sidelight a bird, and backlighting can be dramatic but, first and foremost, get the sun behind you if at all possible.  And don’t forget the sun isn’t behind you at high noon.  Midday light is harsh.  Early morning and late afternoon light is called “golden” for a reason.

Raven On Snow—And winter ptarmigan in deep green foliage.  If understanding how your light meter works is keeping you awake at night, practice shooting dark birds on light backgrounds, and vice versa, until you understand exposure.  Or spend a morning out in your yard with a white towel, a black towel, a black coffee cup, and a white coffee cup.  Put the results in your notebook. Get Low—Eye level to the subject will give it intimacy and a catchlight in that focused eye.  The most important photo equipment I own is my tile layer’s kneepads.  The dramatic water bird shots were taken with the photographer on her belly, on the shoreline getting dirty, or actually in the water getting wet. Déjà vu—If a certain location yields some great shots, double down the next day. You think every day is different, right, so how could you be so lucky two days in a row?  Wrong!  If you’ve done well at a site, the same species may be coming there for a reason, plus your experience from the day before informs you on the best sun angles, perches, and places to be unobtrusive.  Always go back!

I hope these ten tenets will help you in your quest for better bird images.  You need to be mindful and work at it, but never forget the wonder and joy of birds’ beauty and behavior that made you want to pick up a camera.