Having outlined the start of my backyard bird hide project last week, this week I will share the next stage in developing the set-up. The first step obviously is to attract subjects and I did this with seed, fruit and a nectar feeder. In street photography a useful technique is to find an interesting location or “stage” and wait for the players to arrive and complete the scene. With a backyard setup a similar approach is to find a photogenic perch and place it so that birds will use it to stage while awaiting a turn to feed.

To this end our morning walks became perch hunting missions and one I located was a nice twig with a few leaves and berries. Using a small woodworking spring clamp I secured this to a branch in a position that would tempt birds to land and headed into my hide to wait. Before long the confiding Silvereyes were performing on cue and giving me some good opportunities.

Background control is crucial to decent images and can required very small changes in shooting position to achieve what you want and eliminate distractions. The above two shots utilised some distant leaves and a tree fern frond to give a nice green background. Moving slightly and propping up the tree fern frond gave a me a view of a distant autumnal Maple with nice warm tones for a background.

Waiting until the background Maple was in bright sunlight gave another background option.

The birds in all these images were in the same shaded light under the canopy of the tree but the images are all quite different due to conscious choices made to control the background. Background control is crucial to successful image making and I have written about this before. Next week we will take this one step further to achieve some images for my Birds on White project.

Photos with Nikon D850 and Nikon 500mm f4VR lens