Bird Photos: Keeping The Noise To a Minimum

Birds are one of the hardest animals to photograph well. If you google ‘Bird Photos’ you will find there are a number of well composed images in the search results. What you won’t see a lot of is high quality, sharp and well exposed photos. Also finding images that are compelling and tell a story are even harder. The more I try to capture birds well, the more I realise I need to upgrade my gear and focus on capturing a more compelling story.

I am currently on the NSW South Coast collecting images for my first book. I have been capturing bird photos around the small tourist town of Eden (where I grew up). The birds I am photographing are stunning and incredibly interesting to watch. So as you can imagine I am determined to get great quality photographs of them while I am here.

I am happy with the composition and exposure of these images. Although I am having a hard time keeping the noise level to a minimum. The bird photos I have posted below are a good example of the challenges I am having. I was trying to capture birds flying and in order to do this I had to increase my shutter speed to 1/2000 sec. This made the images very dark. To compensate for this I increased my ISO from 100 to alternate between 200 and 400. This caused a large amount of noise, which in turn affected the sharpness and detail in the photo.

It is important to note that this has a lot to do with the telephoto lens I am using. The image quality it produces is fine when operating at 100 ISO. This is great when photographing a stationary subject. The problem was I wanted to photograph birds in flight. I even ventured out in the middle of the day to get as much natural light on my side as possible. Unfortunately I could not get a sharp enough image, as I still had to raise the ISO above 200.

How Do I Plan To Capture Better Quality Bird Photos This Week?

There is no way I can buy the lens I need this week. Therefore I plan to photograph birds the best way I can using only 100 ISO. It is going to be difficult with the lens I have, but I am going to treat it as a challenge. I am also going to avoid photographing the birds in low light altogether. I am going to experiment with one of my prime lenses and see what I can come up with. I will post a few of the better quality images soon, so stay tuned and feel free to comment and compare.