For this blog article I am going to talk about my wildlife photography technique and my thought process behind how I got the images and videos featured in this post. Two of the photos have been shortlisted for Bird Photographer of the Year 2020 which I am extremely happy about, so I thought I would share how I went about getting the images, along with what settings I used. I will also include my own critique on how I could have made them better, from the beneficial view of hindsight.
Firstly, a bit of background info on what this spectacular wildlife event is all about. For me, it is without contest in being the greatest wildlife event that happens in the UK, I have never witnessed anything that compares to it, if you have, then please let me know as it must be pretty special. One of the best features of it, is the fact that it is predictable…
Every winter, huge numbers of waders and wildfowl gather on The Wash in North Norfolk, as the temperatures here are, surprisingly, a bit warmer than the rest of Europe. In fact, there are various weather events at play that make it so special, and when they all combine it is something else. Firstly you need to wait for the highest ‘spring tides’ in winter. Have a look at the tide tables for Snettisham, and plan your visit for the very highest tides of the year. This info is available months or even years in advance. It is quite difficult to get right, as on some days the highest tides are in the middle of the night which means you won’t see a thing. Once you have picked your day, it’s over to luck, and you ideally want low pressure so the waves are higher, and a westerly wind that drives the waves at the land, forcing the birds into the air and eventually on to land.
The sheer numbers of birds here is staggering; we are talking about anywhere between 50,000 to 90,000 red knot alone depending on time of year and conditions. Then, combined with oystercatcher, redshank, godwits, ducks and geese it becomes a real feast for the eyes. If I was you, I would try to time it so that you have one evening and one morning there, as they are both different experiences. On this particular trip, the highest tide was at around 16:30 in the evening, which coincided with a beautiful cloud free sunset. The image below was the very start of the event, and you can see the tide coming in and the birds getting pushed closer.
Waders beginning to be pushed towards land after feeding far out on the Wash. Shuter speed 1/2000, f7.1, ISO 400, 1.4x teleconverter.
For the these four orange and sun-kissed shots I wanted to harness the bright sun and the fast moving birds, so I used a very fast shutter of 1/2000 and a relatively high aperture of f7.1 to keep the detail of the birds that were all different distances apart. The birds were quite far away so I used a 1.4x teleconverter on my 600 lens to get me further out onto the mudflats, and enabling me to frame the shot perfectly because of the telephoto lens. A small landscape lens would have been absolutely useless here. Sometimes I like to use telephotos for landscapes, which is not their typical use.
A similar shot to the one above, with the same settings yet more image processing in Lightroom.
This shot was pretty much the same as the one above it, but with more heavy image processing in Lightroom showing the power of what you can do with a raw file. To get this effect I used about 3 graduated filters around the edges and one radial filter in the middle. They basically made the dark bits darker (the birds), and the light bits more golden, enhancing features that were already there, with a bit of added Clarity, Texture and Dehaze for effect. It’s not Photoshop, just Lightroom, so nothing crazy has been done to this photo.
Wader flocks developing into huge clouds of birds. 1/2000, f7.1, ISO 2500, 1.4x Teleconverter.
The tide just keeps on coming and then eventually the mudflats are completely covered in water, and the sea is much higher and further up the banks than at any other point in the year. This leaves the birds with nowhere to go but on the wing, creating these whirling flocks that fill the skies like smoke. Often, birds of prey take advantage of this and swoop in causing chaos. A photographers dream, and one I have not got close enough to get a picture.
The flocks murmerate high up into the sky, especially in the presence of predators like Peregrine. Shutter 1/2000, f7.1, ISO 3200, 1.4x teleconverter.
The birds have to land at some point, and there is nowhere to go but the shingle banks and spits of RSPB Snettisham. The light had gone over the mudflats, so I packed up and decided to go and have a look on the reserve. There is a nice hide there, perfectly positioned to view the area where the birds normally go. It was too dark to see and I entered the hide, unknowing at what I was about to see. I was the only one mad enough to be going into a viewing hide in the dark. I set up my Canon 1DXii camera on the tripod with my 600m lens plus 1.4x converter, switched the camera to Live view so that I could see the image on the screen. Then reduced the shutter right down to let enough light onto the sensor. Wow! I was blown away. I honestly could not believe what I was seeing. My first view was this:
Up to 50,000 red knot filling the shingle banks of RSPB Snettisham. Shutter 1/15, f7.1, ISO 20,000, 1.4x Converter.
Thousands and thousands of Red Knot all clambering for position on the gravel. Their movement would pulse through the crowd like a Mexican wave, the sound electric…. I really wanted to try to capture this movement. It was easy to do with video, and that I did do, as you will see in a moment. But capturing it in an image is quite challenging, especially when the light had completely gone, and the only real light to work with was from the moon. The aim, is to slow your shutter speed down to around 1/25 or 1/15 of a second, which is quite slow for a shutter speed for wildlife. What this does is blur anything that moves, while keeping anything that is still, in focus. It kind of worked, but not as good as I wanted. The extreme ISO settings that I needed in order to use the last of the light limited the shot in my opinion, causing too much grain. Here are my best attempts under the conditions.
Red Knot at night on RSPB Snettisham. Shutter speed 1/25, f5.6, ISO 25600, 1.4x converter.
The above photo is the one that has been shortlisted by Bird Photographer of The Year, in the Inspirational Encounters Category. With this, I used very similar settings to the shots above it, but I decided to knock the aperture down to fully open at f5.6 to let more light in. In an ideal world where light was a plenty, I would have gone the opposite way with the aperture, and put it up to f8 in order to capture all the detail in the heads of the knot. But light didn’t permit, so I had to open the aperture right up to f5.6.
The photo that captured the most movement in the crowds of knot. But ISO settings were so high that it crushed the shot. Shutter 1/5 sec, f4, ISO 20000.
If I could take these photos again, I would have took the teleconverter off at the sacrifice of focal distance, IE go down from 840mm to 600 mm, which would then let more light into the camera, and let me reduce the ISO from those crazy numbers. Hopefully that would give me a bit more detail and less noise. But hey, who knows! I am happy enough with the shots, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Video is a different kettle of fish in low light as you can use a tripod to stabilise the footage at lower shutter speeds. Obviously the more light the better but you can get away with quite dark conditions with video, as you are not capturing just one image, rather a sequence of images, so the low shutter speed gives a nice fluidity to the footage. There is a rule in fact, which is to have the shutter speed double the selected frame rate. So if you were filming at say 25 frames per second, then the best shutter speed would be to use 1/50, or if you were shooting at 50 FPS, then the shutter should be 1/100 and so on.
I have saved the best till last, so here are some of the dramatic scenes and sounds that I managed to capture on that incredible day in Norfolk. Please share the video if you can as this really helps me out.
Here are a few more images that I managed to get on the same evening. At the top is my first every Astrophotography shot. To capture the stars you need a really low aperture lens. This was a Samyang 14mm f2.8 manual focus, left wide open at f2.8 and focus to infinity. It was done on a tripod with a very low shutter speed of 20 seconds in order to gather the light and detail of the stars. Any more than 20 seconds and you will start to get star trails in the photo, which is caused by rotation of the earth. The stars would then start to appear as lines instead of dots, and the longer you leave the shutter open, the longer the lines will be. Sometimes that can look nice but I didn't want that effect on this particular shot.
Astrophotography at RSPB Snettisham. Shutter 20 seconds, f2.8, ISO 3200
Shutter 1/200, ISO 6400, f10, 600mm lens, 1.4x converter, lots of post processing in Lightroom
Shutter 1/400, ISO 6400, f8, 600mm lens, 1.4x converter, graduated filter on the top and bottom to give the dark effect
I love the atmosphere in the above two cormorant shots, and to get that atmosphere I enhanced the photo using Lightroom, again with graduated and radial filters to make the light look gloomy. The shots that came off the camera are very different indeed. Still atmospheric but nowhere near as good as the processed versions, see below. Lightroom is a very powerful tool. I love using Raw files and harnessing its power to manipulate what you have already captured in the shot. I have never used Photoshop to add or remove anything, as I am not a big fan of that at all.
Shutter 1/200, ISO 6400, f10, 600mm lens, 1.4x converter
Shutter 1/400, ISO 6400, f8, 600mm lens, 1.4x converter
And that was it. A spectacular wildlife event that I firmly believe is the best thing that happens on the UK wildlife calendar. It also really pushes you as a photographer, as there are so many techniques to practice as the event unfolds. The whole thing is an attack on the senses and I could not recommend it enough. If you fancy coming with me next time then please drop me a message, or speak to my good friend Chris Mills who runs Norfolk Birding Tours. Good luck!
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