Bird photography camera settings: a guide for beginners

If you’re just starting out in bird photography, it can be confusing to find clear information on the best camera settings to use.

In this blog, I’ll explain SOme of the different settings available on your camera, and whICH OF THEM I FIND MOST USEFUL IN a range of bird photography scenarios.

A eurasian black cap photographed using the camera settings I’ll discuss in this blog. Photograph: Matt Garnett, 2023.

Your camera settings determine whether your bird photos look blurry or sharp, well-exposed or lacking details, full of ‘noise’ or clear and crisp.

Understanding your camera and having the confidence to change your settings quickly is often the difference between capturing a great shot and a mediocre one.

I’ve been photographing birds for a couple of years now, and here I’ll share my favorite bird photography settings, including:

• The camera mode that helps me enjoy bird photography the most

• The shutter speeds you need to keep your bird shots sharp

• The most useful focus mode on your camera for bird photography

I hope that by the end of this blog, you’ll know how to capture beautiful images of birds exhibiting their full range of natural behaviours out in the wild. So, let’s start with the basics!

Selecting the right camera mode

When researching this blog, and while starting on my own journey in wildlife photography, I found a lot of conflicting information about what is the best mode to use on my camera.

I live in the Czech Republic, where mornings are often very dark and overcast, with fast-changing cloud cover at all times of the year.

A lot of blogs I read suggested using aperture priority mode or manual mode, and I’ll quickly explain why I think these are the wrong choices for anyone just starting in bird photography.

Aperture priority mode

In the controlled conditions of a photography studio, aperture priority mode makes a lot of sense. Studio photographers, such as product or portrait photographers, are usually dealing with relatively stationary subjects, like models or still life objects.

This means that they can select the sharpest aperture setting for their lens, usually somewhere in the middle of the lens’s range, without worrying too much about shutter speed and ISO.

In particular, studio photographers use very low ISO settings like 100 or 200, as they have controllable studio lighting to work with.

For us wildlife photographers, however, we have no such luxuries! We’re often dealing with very low light conditions early in the morning, rapidly changing cloud cover, and birds darting in and out of undergrowth, all of which drastically change the amount of light reaching our camera’s sensor.

Manual mode

Similarly, the only time I would opt for manual mode for wildlife photography would be in situations where the lighting conditions are very stable (such as on a very clear day with blue skies), or when the animal subject is in stable light, such as out in an open field, or when the animal’s behaviour seems relatively predictable.

In these rare situations, changing all of my camera settings to get the ideal aperture, shutter speed, and ISO might be possible, but I’d still be fiddling with my camera more than paying attention to my subject. And fiddling with camera settings all day is not why I got into wildlife photography, and I’m sure you probably feel the same.

Ultimately, we paid a lot of money for our cameras, which are full of incredible technology to help us get the best photographs possible. The phrase you’ll sometimes hear, that ‘real’ photographers only use manual mode, or that pro photographers never use all the automation tools they have available on their cameras, is simply a myth.

A female kestrel in Prague photographed in shutter priority mode (1/640s) with auto ISO (4000). Photograph: Matt Garnett, 2023.

Using shutter priority mode and working with your camera’s histogram

First of all, don’t worry about the word histogram, we’ll get to that in a moment, and it’s a very simple tool on your camera to get the hang of.

Shutter priority mode has far and away become my go-to setting for bird photography, and here are a few reasons why:

• Shutter priority mode allows you to precisely control your shutter speed, which is essential for capturing sharp images of moving birds. This ensures that you can freeze motion without any blur, which is crucial for dynamic shots of birds in flight or capturing quick movements.

• Birds are, as you know, fast and unpredictable. When shutter speed is the only setting you need to adjust, you can quickly respond to sudden changes in your subject’s behaviour without fumbling with manual settings, ensuring you don't miss that perfect shot.

• When I’m using my Sony 200-600mm F5.6/6.3 lens, my aperture will be locked at F6.3 in shutter priority mode. Although this is not the lowest aperture for the lens, it is still capable of producing a blurred background if there is enough separation between the background and subject.

• When you’re new to bird photography, shutter priority mode gives you a way to learn about the effects of different shutter speeds on your images without overwhelming you with full manual control. This will help you build skills gradually and keep improving your photographs every time you go out shooting.

To have the most control with this setting, I also set my ISO to auto when in shutter priority mode. With modern mirrorless cameras, or even later DSLRs, we don’t need to worry too much about higher ISO settings and the image noise they produce. I’ll happily go up to ISO 6,000 on my Sony Alpha camera, without worrying too much about losing the image because of unacceptable noise.

There have also been amazing advances in noise reduction technology recently, such as AI Denoise in Adobe Lightroom, which uses AI to remove unwanted noise and leave you with a clean-looking image. (Just remember that many wildlife photography competitions don’t accept photographs which have been treated with these kinds of AI tools right now.)

However, with this said, the less image noise your photos have, the more editing possibilities you’ll have later on. Your photos will look crisper and have more defined detail with lower ISO settings.

This is particularly true if you’ll be cropping in to a small section of your photo, which is often the case when photographing small birds which haven’t filled up a lot of your frame. In this case, cropping your photo will increase the visibility of any image noise by a significant degree.

Using the histogram to check your exposure

Now, as promised, here’s how to use your camera’s histogram to check your exposure when in shutter priority mode.

The histogram on your camera is a graphical representation of the tonal values of your photo. In simpler terms, it shows the spread of brightness levels in your image from black (left side) to white (right side).

How to use the histogram on a DSLR or mirrorless camera

First, you need to find where the histogram is displayed on your camera. Typically, it can be viewed either in the playback mode after taking a picture, or in real-time during live view mode.

You might need to scroll through your camera’s available display modes until you see the mode which shows the histogram. Here’s what that looks like on my Sony Alpha camera:

The histogram graph is shown by the red arrow.

The histogram is shown as a simple graph that represents light levels. The left side of the graph represents the shadows (darker parts), the middle represents midtones (medium brightness), and the right side represents highlights (brightest parts).

A well-exposed photo will often have a histogram that is spread relatively evenly across the graph with no significant spikes on either end, like this:

A histogram graph showing a correctly exposed photo, with no excessives spikes touching either side.

First of all, don’t worry if your histogram doesn’t match this one. What we are aiming for is a balanced graph which is not overly skewed to the very far left or the very far right. It’s perfectly normal for different lighting conditions to create graphs which are sometimes larger on one side than the other; what we are trying to avoid is extremes.

If the histogram is skewed too much to the left, it indicates that your image may be underexposed (too dark). This means many pixels are concentrated in the shadow regions. In this situation, I’ll increase my shutter speed until the graph on my histogram moves to a more balanced, central position as shown above.

Or, if the histogram skews too much to the right, your image may be overexposed (too bright), with many pixels in the highlight and whites area. In this situation, I’ll lower my shutter speed until the graph on my histogram moves to a more central position.

This way, by keeping your finger on the shutter dial you can make fast adjustments and find a balance between the shutter speed you need (more on that later) and keeping your histogram nice and balanced.

Finally, but importantly, if you have a tall spike touching the far right-side of your histogram, this means there are areas of your photograph which are fully ‘clipped’ or ‘blown out’. Here’s what that looks like:

A histogram graph showing ‘clipped’ highlights where very bright parts of the image are completely overexposed.

This means that the sensor in your camera is receiving so much light that there is no detail being captured from the very brightest parts of your scene, and no amount of editing later on will be able to fix this. So, unless you’re happy for a certain part of your photo to be fully overexposed, such as a very bright section of sky, you’ll want to try your best to avoid this happening where possible.

Using the exposure compensation dial

I’ll just quickly mention another powerful tool at your disposal, which is your camera’s exposure compensation dial.

This allows you to shift the exposure brighter or darker while letting the camera maintain control over aperture and ISO adjustments. Experiment with this dial on your camera and watch how it moves the position of your histogram to the left or to the right. It's a quick and handy way to correct exposure without completely switching out of shutter priority mode.

Now, let’s move on to which shutter speeds are best for different situations.

Black-headed gulls captured in Prague using shutter priority mode (1/2500s) and auto ISO (800). Photograph: Matt Garnett, 2023.

Choose a minimum shutter speed of at least 1/500s (and we’ll get a lot faster)

Capturing animals on the move requires a fast shutter speed. Birds are generally full of energy, so a shutter speed that’s too low will ruin your shots with motion blur.

How fast is fast enough?

In reality, there’s no single ideal shutter speed. Stationary birds sitting on a branch require much slower shutter speeds than birds in flight. And bigger birds tend to be slower than smaller birds, so you can often get away with slower shutter speeds when photographing a large bird like a grey heron, compared to small fast-moving passerine birds like blue tits and great tits.

With that in mind, here are a few recommendations:

• If you’re photographing a bird that isn’t moving much (for instance, a bird that’s sleeping or standing still), use a shutter speed of at least 1/500s or 1/640s, especially if you’re working with a telephoto lens. These shutter speeds may not be strictly necessary to freeze the bird in motion, but they’ll help compensate for camera movement.

• If you’re shooting a small bird that’s moving slowly (for example, a bird that’s preening or a large bird that’s moving at a slow to medium speed such as a swan feeding), around 1/1000s is a good choice.

• If you’re shooting a fast-moving bird, including birds in flight, you should choose a shutter speed of at least 1/2000s. If it’s a small bird such as a swift or swallow flying at high speeds, then 1/2500s, 1/3200s, or even 1/4000s might be needed.

• And for the ultimate scenario such as a kingfisher diving into water, you’ll probably want to use 1/4000s as a minimum.

Now, you might ask: Why can’t I just set my shutter speed to 1/4000s and leave it at that?

Unfortunately, every shutter speed boost comes with a payoff. The higher the shutter speed, the darker the resulting exposure and the higher your ISO will jump, resulting in more image noise. So, unless the light is extremely bright, you’ll often need to keep the shutter speed at these recommended amounts to try and get the cleanest images possible.

And finally, what about focus modes?

In most situations, using continuous autofocus is your best bet for bird photography due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of birds in motion.

This focus mode, which is also sometimes called AF-C or AI Servo AF depending on your camera brand, actively adjusts the focus as the subject moves, ensuring that the bird remains sharp even when it is rapidly changing position or even flying towards your camera.

This is obviously useful when tracking birds in flight or capturing unpredictable behaviours, as it reduces the chances of getting blurred images from missing focus. Continuous autofocus effectively handles the challenge of maintaining focus on fast-moving subjects, allowing you to concentrate on composition and timing.

Of course, continuous autofocus doesn’t work every single time, and it’s inevitable that even this powerful tool will miss focus every now and again (unless you’re lucky enough to own the new Sony A9III!). However, it’s another setting your camera has that lets you pay more attention to your subject, safe in the knowledge that basic processes are being taken care of in the background.

After all, why did we spend all that money on camera equipment packed with these incredible tools if we’re not taking advantage of them?

Happy shooting!