birds

Minimalist B&W Photos of Birds in the Skies Above Greece

For his personal project Above The Street, Below The Sky, photographer Andreas Kamoutsis spent over two years watching and photographing the birds flying above the busy streets of big cities in Greece. The series is a minimalist, black-and-white study of shadows and shapes.

Photographing the Hula Valley, Rest Stop for Half a Billion Birds Every Year

The Hula is an agricultural region located in northern Israel with abundant fresh water. It is a major stopover for various birds’ migration path along the Syrian-African Rift Valley between Africa, Europe, and Asia. An estimated half a billion birds are passing through the Hula Valley every year.

Surreal ‘Chronophotographs’ of Birds in Flight

For his project Ornithographies, Spanish photographer Xavi Bou wanted to capture images of birds in flight that the human eye simply could never see on its own. That's how he struck on the idea of using an age old technique called "chronophotography."

Field Test: Bird Photography with the Canon 7D II and 300mm f/2.8 II

I'm a hobbyist bird photographer and I recently went birding in the Himalayan foothills in India, to a town called Sattal. For the trip, I rented a Canon 7D Mark II, 300mm f/2.8 II, and 2X TC III teleconverter. My own equipment is a 7D and 100-400L, both of the first generation.

Tip: Get Low When Photographing Birds in Water

Like other shorebirds, western grebes do not go by the human calendar or clock to tell them when to start their new family. They merely go by their instinct relying on the weather cycle. Based on human calendar, the breeding season typically starts around April through end of July and by late August through October. During these period, you can find the adult pairs carrying their young(s) on their back.

Here's one of my biggest tips for photographing shorebirds: get low.

A Hummingbird Swarm Photo Shot with a Mirror and a Bird Feeder

This past weekend, New York-based photographer Brian Maffitt set up an angled mirror underneath his bird feeder and photographed hummingbirds for a few hours. Afterward, he combined a large number of the photos into this single, surreal composite photo showing ruby-throated hummingbirds swarming.

Photographer Captures Shots of Hawks Exchanging Food in Midair

Photographer Phoo Chan was shooting in Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont, California, recently when he spotted hawks doing food exchanges in midair. The photo above is a 5-shot composite showing a male Northern Harrier passing a small bird it caught to one of its three offspring.

Photos of an Unusual Pet Family Are a Hit Online

An unusual family of animals is winning hearts on Instagram. The account @bob_goldenretriever has attracted over 77,000 followers so far by regularly sharing snapshots from the life of one man's pets: a eccentric but tight-knit group that consists of one golden retriever, one hamster, and eight birds.

Portraits of Exotic Birds Recovering at Sanctuaries

While I’ve never been a bird owner nor have I ever been attracted to owning a bird, this new series, Earthbound by photographer Oliver Regueiro affected me in a profound way. I’ve been close to animal rights issues for a number of years (mostly with dogs and cats), but cruelty to any animal is a crime and needs more light shed on it.

3 Month Time-Lapse Shows Pigeons Going From Eggs to Adults

Back in June of 2014, YouTube user AvWuff noticed two pigeons and two eggs sitting in the flower box outside their window. Seeing an opportunity for an interesting project, AvWuff decided to set up a camera and capture the birth and growth of the baby pigeons.

Portraits of Birds Bursting with Personality

As a child photographer, Leila Jeffreys was taught to take in wounded animals, particularly birds, and nurse them back to a healthy state. It was through experiences like this that Jeffreys grew a personal fascination and even greater appreciation for the intricacies of these creatures.

And now she’s paying a tribute of sorts to her knowledge and love for those animals, by bringing owls, eagles, budgies, cockatiels and more into her studio to showcase their varied personalities.

Artist Creates Mesmerizing Time-Lapse-like Videos that Trace the Flight Paths of Birds

Artist and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Dennis Hlynsky, is interested in studying the way small-brained animals flock in groups. Using a special editing technique, he can visualize the paths of each individual in the flock, and though he's recorded everything from ants to fish to flies, the most fascinating examples of this technique in action involve flocks of birds.

Photog Documents the Illegal Hunting of Songbirds Along the Mediterranean

AP Photographer David Guttenfelder is a conflict photographer. He's spent much of his photographic career capturing war through the lens of his camera. One thing he certainly never considered himself was a bird photographer.

But when he was sent on an assignment to illustrate a National Geographic piece on the illegal hunting of songbirds, he became one. And it slowly dawned on him that he wasn't just doing a documentary, environmental, or conservation piece -- this was simply another form of conflict photography.

Beautiful Studio Portraits of Birds in Flight

Photographer Paul Nelson spends the majority of his time shooting commercial work for big name clients like MAC Cosmetics or Target. But when the flow of work began to slow to a trickle over the past couple of years, he embarked on a personal project that he hoped would remind him why he loved photography.

Thus was born Aviary. Shot in partnership with Springbook Nature Center, the photo series captures beautiful studio-style portraits of birds taking flight as they're released back into the wild.

Photographing a Dogfight Between Two Eagles

Here's the story of how I was in the right-place at the right-time for a special series of eagle photographs.

I was driving down a dirt road near my house when I spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting on the ground. I pulled over for a shot, thinking it may be feeding on something, but it took off and flew across the road in front of me.

Birds of Aperture Combines the Worlds of Cameras and Taxidermy

Photographer Paul Octavious has collected a number of vintage cameras over the years, with some of them handed down to him by his grandfather. One day a house in his neighborhood had an estate sale for an old man that had recently passed away. When Octavious paid the big house a visit, he found that the man was a taxidermist with a large collection of stuffed birds and bird wings.

Mesmerizing Footage of Thousands Upon Thousands of Birds Dancing in the Sky

If you're maintaining any of kind bucket list of things you'd like to experience before you die, you might want to think about putting "a massive murmuration of starlings" on that list. That's what Paris-based director and photographer Neels Castillon was treated to recently, and his video documenting the encounter has been making waves on the web.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Photog Spends Eight Years Capturing the 39 Birds of Paradise

If you've ever played any of the Pokémon video games, you probably know it feels like to spend hours or days trying to capture a rare monster in order to fill in another entry in your Pokédex. National Geographic photographer Tim Laman knows that feeling through his photography project titled Birds of Paradise. Laman spent a whopping eight years photographing all 39 birds-of-paradise species in the rainforests of New Guinea -- the first time it has ever been done.

The Invention of the Pigeon Camera for Aerial Photography

We've featured a couple of projects involving cameras strapped to birds recently (see here and here), but photographing with birds is anything but a new idea. It was actually invented a little over a century ago, in 1907, by a German photography pioneer named Julius Neubronner.

Tiny Cameras Mounted to Birds Capture What Life is Like With Wings

For nearly half a decade now, filmmaker John Downer has been pioneering the use of tiny cameras to capture photographs and videos from a bird's-eye view -- literally. He attaches extremely small and light HD cameras to the backs of birds in order to capture incredible point-of-view imagery of the animals going about their day-to-day lives.

Photographs of Birds Caught in Mist Nets

John James Audubon, a French-American ornithologist (a person who studies birds), became internationally known in the 1800s for his ambitious goal of painting and documenting all the different bird species found in the United States. His methods, however, weren't exactly bird friendly. To prepare his subjects, Audubon would first kill them using fine shot and then fix them into striking poses using wire.

Ornithologists these days have a much better way of capturing birds for science: mist nets. The nylon mesh nets virtually invisible to birds when suspended between two poles, and allow scientists to capture, study, and release the birds unharmed. Photographer Todd R. Forsgren wants to be the modern day equivalent of Audubon. His project titled Ornithological Photographs consists entirely of photos showing different birds caught in mist nets.

Photos of Flamingos as Numerous as the Sand on the Seashore

Lake Bogoria in Kenya is home to one of the world's largest populations of lesser flamingos. When conditions are right, the lake turns into an eye-dazzling spectacle, with over a million birds congregating to feed on the blue-green algae in the waters. Wildlife photographer Martin Harvey was able to witness, shoot, and film one such gathering, and calls it "truly one of the worlds greatest wildlife experiences left on earth."

Use a Red Dot Sight for Locating Subjects with Super Telephoto Lenses

Photo enthusiast Chris Malcolm needed a better way to aim his 500mm lens at fast moving subjects (e.g. birds in flight), so he upgraded his lens with a DIY sighting aid by attaching a non-magnified red dot sight:

They're designed to clamp onto a gun sight wedge mount, so some kind of adapter is required. I played with the hot shoe mount, but it was too flexible -- the sight needed re-zeroing at every mount, and was easily knocked out of calibration. The degree of precision required to aim the central focus sensor at the target via the dot also made parallax error a problem on the hot shoe. So I decided to mount it directly on the lens. Least parallax error, plus the geometry of the lens barrel and the sight mount naturally lines it up with the lens. To protect the lens barrel I glued the sight clamp to a cardboard tube slightly too small, slit open to provide a sprung grab on the lens body. The slit also handily accommodates the focus hold button on the lens barrel.

Malcolm reports that the site "works amazingly well", making it "trivially easy to aim the lens at anything very quickly".

Breathtaking Murmuration of Starlings Caught on Camera

Sophie Windsor Clive was canoeing on the River Shannon in Ireland when she came across one of nature's most beautiful phenomenon: a murmuration of starlings. This is when vast numbers of starlings fly together in giant, cloud-like formations. Luckily for Sophie, she had her camera handy.

Shooting a Hummingbird (with a Camera)

Editor’s note: Whenever I see a hummingbird, I always want to shoot a low depth of field photograph of it, …