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Bird photography
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This hungarian guy, Bence Mate started out with a simple bath for birds in his garden, and taking photos of the visitors from a hide… now he is building whole lakes and stuff. Might be of some interest for some of yous. If you have a garden and a lens longer than 200mm, you don’t need much more only some work and ingenuity to get awesome photos…
If I was to get just one shot that was half as good as any of those on that site I’d be more than happy. Thanks for the link Zoltan – instant bookmark.
Alan.
Cheers Big Z.. I got this over at the F place. Those are some hides I must say.
I was thinking about making something for the garden.. plenty of timber and plenty of space… I just wonder if it would be worth it for the common garden birds only.
There’s a few down along the River Slaney as well, I might look into getting access to some of these when the weather warms up a bit.. as they don’t come with double glazed windows and sleeping bags like our pal Bence.
A few years back when I was writing my thesis, I was capturing small singing birds to put rings on them, and there were mostly just sparrows and coal tits in the botanic garden, where I was working. In the winter I started feeding on a large feeding table on a spot among bushes and trees, and captured the birds on video. After a few months much less seen birds started visiting the place, and I got falcons and other predators on tape, too. I used a food mix that was originally designed for parrots, and when I wasn’t shooting video, I fed them with ground corn… they seemed to like it. I think, the most important thing is consistency, if they find the food to be available every single day, even the most shy creatures will show up… you miss a day or two and they go down to Wexford to pose for Irishwonkafan.
Until you don’t get floor heating and a/c in your hide, you can use insulated trousers and jackets…
I think, building such a large hide is worthwile only in an area where there are already dozens of birds and mammals, but you can use some of the ideas… like putting a dry branch in your garden for the birds to pose on or building a small pond as a bath for them. If you pre-arrange the photos and make the birds to stand where you want them to stand, you will get smoother background, no distracting blurred branches in the foreground, you can plan the lighting, etc.
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