Birds are the most common subjects to photograph when it comes to urban wildlife, as they can be seen almost anywhere in the world, even in the most urbanized and polluted of cities. They’re also the subject of this month’s photo contest, which you can enter for FREE as a member of the Journal. Insects and other arthropods, particularly flying ones, also offer intriguing challenges for photographers due to their size and speed, and nearly every location on Earth is home to a wide array just waiting for your camera.
As we discussed earlier, setting up a bird feeder near your home will invite regular avian visitors to your yard, allowing you to easily capture images, potentially without even leaving your house.
Walking around your town will also render you with lots of bird encounters, and so will visiting your local parks or forests. You can likely come across small songbirds, ducks, and maybe even shorebirds, and if you’re lucky enough, birds of prey.
Observing and photographing birds requires you to be stealthy and quiet, and since they fly away really quickly, I advise you to use fixed settings. For example, when shooting birds, I rarely shoot below a speed of 1/500th of a second. If it’s really sunny outside, or if the sun is right in front of me, like during the sunrise, I raise my speed to 1/1000th of a second and higher. I normally work with an aperture of f/6.3 or f/8 for sharpness while using my 600mm lens, which, regardless of the narrow aperture, tends to give me shallow depths of field unless the bird is really far away. As for my ISO, I rarely go above 500 unless I’m shooting in very dark places, in which case I adjust accordingly. I don’t normally use tripods as shooting birds keeps you very active, panning to one side or the other, and moving all around while focusing. Due to this, I recommend always having your autofocus mode activated when photographing birds so you don’t lose any time trying to focus on our winged friends and you don’t miss your shot.
Another great tip is to find a place with lots of flowers that will surely attract some hummingbirds, if they visit your area. If you stay still enough, these tiny birds will grow used to you and flutter around the flowers without a care in the world, allowing you to get lots of nice images of them. Their high-speed wings require fast shutter speeds and quick reflexes, so be prepared!
Some of the most ignored wildlife in urban settings are arthropods, such as insects and spiders. They get a lot of attention in exotic locations, as the species in those places tend to be really colorful, unique, and sometimes even quite large, making photographing these normally tiny critters a much easier task. However, urban centers tend to also be the home of very interesting arthropods, and it’s a shame that we rarely photograph them, even when they are kind enough to crawl into our homes to make this endeavor a much easier one!
Insects like butterflies and bees are always a delight to photograph. They are very easy to find, as you are sure to run into these winged animals anywhere in your town there’s a batch of flowers. You may have some flower bushes in your yard, or maybe you’ve got some potted geraniums or something like that somewhere around your home, making it easier for you to come across butterflies, ladybugs, and even garden spiders or native bees!
You may be thinking, “Well, I don’t have a macro lens. That’s why I ignore insects and other bugs — I just can’t get a nice portrait of them.” I’m very happy to tell you that you don’t need a macro lens to shoot our tiny neighbors — you can do so using a telephoto lens, in case you don’t want to get close to the creepy crawlers around you. I recently photographed a native bee in a local park using my 200-600mm and it actually came out pretty decent. I then cropped it in Photoshop to get a closer look at the bee, making up for my lack of a macro lens at that moment. The same technique applies to using other lenses like zoom lenses or macro substitutes like extension tubes, which can give you that 1x approach to your subject but may not be as sharp. No worries: Your editing software can help you sharpen that image up.
Another benefit of urban arthropod photography is that insects, arachnids, and their relatives tend to be present year-round, although they can be harder to find in winter. If you pay close attention, you’ll probably run into migratory butterflies, native and endangered bees, cute ladybugs, and very photogenic spiders, making your urban photo safaris much more interesting than if you only focus on birds.
Birds, of course, are great subjects to photograph, especially during the winter months when lots of species are migrating. However, we can always look beyond the obvious and shine a light on the other inhabitants of our cities, making for a more varied and well-rounded wildlife portfolio that ignores no one.