My First Time Birding with the Nikon P1000
I'm not sure why, but I've not done much birding since my obsession with super zoom cameras started over a decade ago. But over the last year, birds have been showing up more and more in the articles on my website and my YouTube videos. And I just made my first ever video dedicated to birding with a super zoom camera!
Photographing birds is usually impossible with a regular camera. I mean, you generally can't walk up to a bird, thrust the camera in its face and take a close-up picture. But with a super zoom camera or a camera with a super telephoto lens, you can get a really close-up picture or video. And when you can get super close to birds, you just might find like I did that they are fun to watch and really quite beautiful. And it's virtually impossible not to think that baby birds are the cutest things you've ever seen! :)
I shoot with the Nikon COOLPIX P1000 super zoom camera. The P1000 has an optical zoom range of 24mm to 3000mm (35mm equivalent). But you don't need a 3000mm focal length to capture great pictures of birds. I've read articles that say you can use a 400mm lens for birding. So far, my best pictures and video have been at focal lengths of over 1000mm. I might be a newbie birder, but I think your going to need more than a 400mm lens to get good close-ups of birds in most circumstances.
The Nikon COOLPIX P1000 superzoom camera.
If you don't have a P1000 and you don't have an endless supply of money to spend on a high-end super telephoto lens to get you closer to my 1000mm mark, then you could add a 1.5X teleconverter to a 400mm lens to reach a focal length of 600mm. Or add a 1.5X teleconverter to a 600mm lens to get you to 900mm. Of course, if your camera has a sensor with a high megapixel sensor, then you could also crop a picture taken at a focal length of 400mm or 600mm to effectively zoom in further.
To illustrate why it's helpful to have a long lens for birding, check out the following two pictures of Egrets on the other side of a lake. They were both taken from the same exact spot. The first picture was taken at a wide-angle focal length of 24mm. Lots of cell phone cameras have a focal length of around 24mm, so this is a picture that you might get if you took a picture from this spot with your cell phone. The second picture was taken at a focal length of 3000mm. That's a shot you cannot get with your cell phone!
According to the Smithsonian Institute, there are at least fifty billion birds globally. There are about eight billion people on the earth, so simple math tells us that there are more than six birds for every human on the planet! That means two things. First, if the birds ever get together and decide to take over the world then humans are in big trouble. And second, there are plenty of birds out there so you so probably won't have to travel very far to find them.
It's likely that there are some interesting birds either where you live or not too far away. For my first birding video, I visited two man-made lakes in the Phoenix Arizona area which are not too far from my house. The first lake that I visited is at Veterans Oasis Park in Chandler, AZ.
Veterans Oasis Park in Chandler, AZ
This park is actually a groundwater recharge area that the city of Chandler turned into a wetlands area. Chandler isn't the only city that does this, so check out the ground water recharge areas in the cities and towns near where you live. You might be amazed at the birds that you'll see at a man-made lake. At Veterans Oasis Park, more than 150 different species of birds have been spotted by birders.
The main lake at Veterans Oasis Park.
The other man-made lake that I visited for my birding video is in the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch in Gilbert, AZ.
Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch in Gilbert, AZ.
Seventy of the one hundred and ten acres of this park contain lakes that are a part of a city water recharge basin. According to the city, 298 species of birds have been observed at the park. If you're in the area and like birds, then this park is certainly worth a visit.
One of the lakes at the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch
As a newbie birder, I was happy to learn that I didn't have to know the perfect camera settings to get some pretty good pictures and videos of birds. Modern cameras are pretty good at figuring out the right settings. I took all of the pictures in this article and in my birding video with the camera in fully automatic mode. If course, setting the best aperture, shutter speed and ISO can help you get the absolute best picture, but don't let that stop you from getting out there with the birds. The only bad picture is the one you didn't take because you stayed home.
In addition to the regular fully automatic mode, the Nikon P1000 has a special automatic mode for bird photography. Why should you use the bird mode? Um, I don't really know because the camera manual doesn't really explain it. The manual does mention that auto-zoom framing is available and the camera's sound is turned off, but the only other description of bird-watching mode is "Use this mode when capturing images of birds in a telephoto position"... Whatever that means :) And the P1000 product page on the Nikon website just says that "the bird-watching mode optimizes the camera's settings for capturing elusive creatures"... whatever that means :)
The most notable thing about the P1000's bird mode is that the auto-focus box on the camera's display screen is very small and it is locked in the center of the frame. For a picture of a bird to look good, the bird's head and specifically its eye should be in sharp focus. So I suppose the idea is to put the bird's eye in the little box before pressing the shutter button to ensure that the camera's auto-focus system is focusing on the bird's eye.
If the bird is not moving then this little box is a great tool to get a sharp picture. But, most of the birds that I photographed for this article were cruising around on the lake, so the bird's eye - and often the whole bird - was moving around all over the place on the camera's display screen, so it was really hard to get the bird's head in the focus box, frame the shot and then to press the shutter button. It turns out that birds do not care one bit that you are trying to take their picture!
So I mostly use regular auto-focus mode when taking pictures of birds. The only downside to regular auto-focus mode is that the camera might not focus on the bird's head. And with such a narrow depth of focus at focal lengths over 1000mm, a bird's body might be in sharp focus, but it's head might not be. For example, the water just behind the grebe in the picture below is in sharp focus, but its head (and in particular its bill) are not as sharp. By the way, does anyone know why the grebe is partially submerged like that?
Well, I'm a newbie to this bird watching thing, but I've really enjoyed it so far. So if your camera gear can get you to a focal length of at least 400mm and you haven't done so already, then I encourage you to try pointing your camera at some birds! I find that getting a sharp picture of a bird that would be impossible to capture without zooming in super close is really rewarding. Plus, I'm finding that birding is like a treasure hunt. Different species of birds tend to show up at a given location as the seasons change so you never know what you'll see when you go out birding. Getting close-up photographs of all these birds is kind of like collecting baseball cards!
Watch the Video
I also recorded some video clips of the birds that you've seen in this article plus some other birds too. You can click on the picture below to watch my first ever birding video! The video will play on YouTube. I hope that you enjoy watching the video! If you do then leave a comment in the comments section on YouTube to let me know that you stopped by!
Thanks for reading this article and watching the video! You can also check out some of my other articles and videos below. Or you can browse through all of my articles.
Other Articles You Might Like
- Super Zoom Variety Episode 3
- Super Zoom Variety Episode 2
- Theodore Roosevelt Dam Then and Now
- Zoom: Buildings In the Grand Canyon
- Zooming in on Dragonflies
- Goodyear Blimp with the Nikon P1000
- Arizona's Thanksgiving Day Parade
- SeaWorld Orca Encounter Full Show
- Filming or Playback - When to Apply Slow Motion?
John Miller
is the owner of "One Lens Two" and "In and Around Phoenix". He is also a co-owner of "Fooding Around Phoenix". John is always looking for collaboration opportunities so contact him using one of the options below! 