Getting started
You don’t have to trudge through the wilderness to take great wildlife shots. Start off close to home, in your back garden…
Set up a feeding station
You can coax birds within reach of your lens by setting up a feeding station and keeping it topped up throughout the winter months. Gradually move the feeders closer to where you’ll be shooting from – whether that’s a temporary hide, garden shed or the kitchen window – over a period of weeks, and consider how the light changes throughout the day before deciding on the final position for the feeder.
Avoid getting mucky!
Shooting from a low angle produces more intimate, eye-level portraits of ground-feeding birds and mammals. Looking through the viewfinder can be awkward or impossible at ground level, but if you have an EOS DSLR with a vari-angle LCD, you’re laughing. Or you could use Canon’s Camera Connect smartphone app to use remote Live View with a Wi-fiequipped camera. If you have neither, raise the camera off the deck using a beanbag, your camera bag or a low-level tripod.
Use a fast shutter speed
Shoot in Aperture Priority exposure mode (Av on the main dial) and set a low f/number, such as f/4.5 or f/5.6 to give you a large aperture. The maximum (largest) apertures not only reduce the depth of field, helping to blur distracting background details, but they give you the fastest possible shutter speed for the given lighting conditions. You will also need very fast shutter speeds to freeze the wings of small garden birds buzzing from branch to branch. Increase the ISO as needed for a shutter speed of around 1/500 sec for bird portraits, and 1/20001/4000 sec for flight shots.