I’m not a birder per se—if there’s an equivalent word for “person who looks for insects/reptiles/amphibians/small mammals”, I’m one of those. But I do enjoy looking for and at birds when I’m on hikes or even just hanging in my backyard, where there’s a resident catbird who seems to find my presence a serious impediment to his daily activities.
Bird photography is a real challenge, however. It’s not just that the subjects have a tendency to move quickly and unexpectedly, often in seeming response to having a camera pointed at them. I’ve also discovered that the conventional wisdom among avid bird photographers that you have got to have a bird eye pointed at or near the camera for most bird shots to work is really true. I’m not sure quite why, but a bird that is three-quarters turned away from the photographer’s position is visually unengaging in some fashion. I think here you have a great example of where a photograph as “frozen time” loses out to the visual experience of everyday life. Sometimes we embrace a photo because the moment it freezes seems to capture the essence of an experience or object or place so beautifully, but with birds, they’re almost always in motion, so you see the whole bird in 360 and when it takes flight, you see what is essentially something different than the bird on a branch or on the ground.
There are exceptions, of course: herons, storks, egrets, etc. are easy to photograph usually precisely because they are often standing still as they look for prey in the shallows, and many of them will tolerate a photographer shifting around to get that eyes-on-the-camera angle.
Anyway, the silhouette shot was basically an accident—I didn’t have the camera set correctly for the shade we were in as we headed for an observation post at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge and this pretty little songbird suddenly flew in quite close to me. (I don’t recall what the species was, but it was a migrant that I hadn’t seen before.) I took the picture and while it wasn’t what I had in mind, I was kind of taken with it anyway.
I got into photography at the same time I was heavily into birding and for a while thought about combining the two interests. My photography gear was the old Pentax screw-mount system, and I was even able to get the 500/4.5 Takumar lens, and I had a decent tripod. And of course I was shooting Fuji Velvia, because that's what the folks in Nature Photographer magazine used. But I don't know that I ever got a bird photograph I was happy with. I suppose now with autofocus and continuous shooting and near infinite storage I might have better luck, but I'm not about to shell out for a long lens for my DSLR.
My conclusion was that birds are always very small and far away. And also, that doing birding and doing bird photography are just very different activities and one should decide which you're trying to do on a given outing, and especially don't try to do one with a group of people doing the other.
Curious about this desire for eyes-on image. Maybe that descends from a naturalist’s want of fullest description. But I cherish this first image because I am sharing a perspective with this “beast”--possibly experiencing something of the same. Over the shoulder seems a so powerful way of engaging another as it constructs or sustains the illusion that we are sharing our respective expertise. Thanks Tim.