My journey into photography
At some point, I can’t remember exactly when, I spotted an awesome looking bird and thought to myself “wow, my friends are never going to believe this”. I spent a fair bit of time trying to learn the art of capturing the likeness of a bird with my iPhone pushed up against my binoculars, and I got pretty good at it! Sure the images were hazy, cropped weird, a little out of focus, but I could finally share the cool birds I was seeing! The problem was that once I started taking pictures, I wanted to take better pictures. I wanted to take pictures of birds that were moving, birds that were far away, birds that were so beautiful that the haziness of my binocular-iPhone-method simply just didn’t do them justice.
This desire for better pictures brought me to the easiest way to get into wildlife photography, the bridge camera, also known as “superzooms”. These digital cameras operate much like a point-and-shoot camera that existed in that brief period of time between film and cell phone cameras. The only update is that instead of the tiny little zoom you had on the point-and-shoot, the new superzooms have, you guessed it, huge zooms. After working through all the options I bought a Lumix FZ300 by Panasonic. For about $500 I was able to take high quality photos with a 24x magnification. There were of course trade-offs, like the tiny sensor in the camera was basically the same as an iphone, but for a first camera it was perfect for learning the basics. Immediately I was taking great pictures of birds (by my standards), and also discovered the joy of capturing birds I couldn’t identify so I could analyze them when I got home. To say I was hooked is an understatement. I spent every moment I could find learning how to improve my skills, and I even stopped working on this website for 6 months because photography just became more important (sorry about that).
It didn’t take long on my photography journey to realize that there was a limit to what I could do with my little camera. That tiny sensor I had was absolutely ineffective in low light, and unfortunately “low light” is a good way to describe dawn, when the birds are their most active. The autofocus was good, but had trouble focusing quickly to catch birds in flight. And lastly the 12 megapixels and small size of the sensor just wasn’t capturing enough light to make the sort of edits I wanted. I love full frame images of birds in the trees, and after zooming, then cropping, the image just wasn’t resolved well. There is a comment section at the bottom of this post, and I would be happy to hear about all of the reasons I’m probably wrong, but I wanted to upgrade to something that could be capable of truly beautiful bird photos.
Enter the message boards, discord servers, countless online articles, and professional reviews. I even reached out to a few of my favorite wildlife photographers directly, and people were happy to share their advice on the subject. It finally all boiled down to getting a DSLR camera, with a long range lens, and doing it before the industry moved to entirely mirrorless cameras. The camera everyone kept coming back to was the Nikon D500, with the Nikkor 200-500mm lens. A friend gave me an analogy that this setup was to wildlife photography, as the Miles Davis album “Kind of Blue” was to Jazz. I told myself I would wait a year to upgrade, but it became quickly apparent that Nikon was starting to discontinue their DSLR lineup and move to fully mirrorless cameras. If I wanted to get in on the old style, I was told that now was the time.*
It wasn’t long before, like a little child bargaining with his parents in a toy store, I cashed in a bunch of amazon gift cards and negotiated with my wife for my fathers day gift, 9th wedding anniversary gift, and 38th birthday gift all into the exact sum needed to purchase a new camera and lens. It felt like a reckless expenditure having just plunked down the money for the Lumix 60 days prior, and I wasn’t proud of it. That is until I started using it. The D500 is FAST, and the large lens got me so close to my subjects I was seeing details I couldn’t have noticed through my binoculars. It re-awoke the birding hobby because I was taking pictures of common birds again like House Sparrows, Cardinals, and Robins, just to see what they looked like up close. When I went out birding and found unique birds, I posted my favorite images on instagram and strangers started complimenting me. For once it felt like my photos were being liked by others not because they knew me, but because they actually enjoyed the photos.
In fact, having a dedicated instagram handle for birding (@comebirdingwithme) finally made sense. I love to scroll back and look at the progress I’ve made on my photography journey. My first photos were SO BAD, but i’ll never take them down because the journey has been so much fun. Now my biggest problem is that I feel like I’ve raised the bar for myself, and I can’t post a photo that isn’t better than every other photo that came before it. I suppose that's just part of the journey.
Originally I thought this post could be a review of my three cameras (iPhone, Lumix, and Nikon), but I quickly realized I’m totally unqualified to review cameras. What I will say is that you get what you pay for, and if your plan is to get Aunt Mary or Uncle Clark to like your Instagram post, you can’t go wrong with any of the cameras I have. If you want an impartial observer to like your post, then my Nikon is definitely going to give you a leg up. Of course you can really get lost in comparing specs, lenses, and sensors, but keep in mind the most important thing I’ve found for bird photography is getting the camera between you and your subject. In that sense no camera is going to make up for sleeping late, and hanging around in your backyard. For some, a new pair of boots might be a better photography investment than a fancy camera. In that case I recommend a pair of the Asolo Fugitive GTX, which comes in water-resistant suede, but thats a review for another day.
If you have a moment, here’s a link to my gallery, I would love to hear what you think!
*A brief footnote on why the industry switch to mirrorless cameras is problematic for bird photography, and the urgency behind the “now is the time” rationale. In the traditional DSLR camera, there's a mirror that reflects the image coming through the lens up to the camera's viewfinder, and ultimately your eye. Therefore you are actually looking directly through the camera lens, with no filter between you and the subject. In the new mirrorless cameras, the digital sensor is taking in the image, and then digitally transmitting it to an LCD screen in the viewfinder. As a consequence of this, when you take a picture with a mirrorless camera, the processor has to capture the image while also projecting the image in the viewfinder, and it causes the LCD screen to go black for a moment. If you are trying to track a bird in flight, that moment can ruin your ability to keep the bird in the viewfinder for additional shots. The only way to solve this today is to buy the absolute top-of-the-line mirrorless camera, which will refresh the screen quickly enough for you to not miss the fast moving bird. Since the technology is still new, the camera itself costs a pretty penny, and the new lenses are also very expensive. Having to start from scratch with mirrorless would probably cost about 3-5x the price of getting an older DSLR before it was discontinued.