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I always try to talk to people about different moments to capture in their bird photography. To me, that’s one of my favorite aspects of this genre – variety. We of course have perched photos and then photos of birds in flight. But there are so many more moments we can capture that make for an interesting photo.

In this case I was out shooting one morning and following this Snowy Egret around. He wasn’t doing too much, but at one point he stopped walking, looked up at me and did this little shake that I’m sure we’ve all see birds do. I happened to capture a few frames and I thought this one made for a fun photo to share.

Sony Alpha 1 + 70-200mm | f/2.8 | 1/2500th | ISO 2500

Not only is the bird looking directly at me and you can feel the motion of the wings, but you also see the feathers in the air around it. As you’ll often hear me say, I’m not winning any awards with the photo, but I do think moments like this are fun to capture and very sharable to your friends and fellow photographers on social media.

Gear, Settings and Post Processing

I used my Sony Alpha 1 with the 70-200mm lens for this one. This isn’t a lens I use often, but I was doing a pre-release demo/review for Sony right before they released the lens so I had to find birds that allow me to get a little closer. I had my camera set to AF-C. I was using Wide Auto Focus since there wasn’t much around to confuse the camera, and the Bird Eye feature was engaged at the time, thought where ever it was focussed on the bird it would have been in focus.

I was on Manual Exposure mode at f/2.8, Auto ISO which was at 2500, and 1/2500th sec.

Post processing was done in Lightroom for exposure, cropping, color and toning corrections and a quick trip to Topaz DeNoise AI for some noise reduction. (more on Topaz here)

As always my editing is covered in my Wildlife Editing Secrets Course. Also, you can find links to all of my gear, computers, hard drives, etc… over on the Gear page which can be clicked on in the top menu (or just click here). And it’s always appreciated if you use the links on that page (even if you’re not purchasing that specific item) when buying anything. It doesn’t cost you a penny and it’ll help me out a bit 🙂

And if you want to learn more about actually photographing the birds, check out “Matt’s Guide to Bird Photography”. People absolutely LOVE this course!

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