A majority of time in Ecuador we were birding at feeder areas of Lodges and Reserves. These brought in the birds, often very close. Take this Rufus Motmot for example.
Such a beautiful bird and it was so close. Do you notice anything about the composition that detracts from the image? If you said the tail is cut off, you’re right! I had my lens zoomed out to the maximum 400mm and I didn’t get the whole bird in the frame. All I had to do was to zoom back to 300mm and it would have been a GreatBirdPic, but I didn’t (when a beautiful bird like this flies in sometimes I get so excited I forget to do the little things). This happened several times on my Ecuador trip and I had to remind myself to reduce the zoom to frame the whole bird.
Here’s another shot, this time of a White-tailed Kite flying overhead and as you can see the whole upper wing is cut off.
Again I was shooting the lens at 400mm. This often happens when trying to take BIF shots – as the bird approaches you zoom out to the max but at some point it is so close it becomes too big to fit in the frame. In these situations it’s better to start zoomed out about half-way so when the bird gets nearer the image is still within the frame and you’re more likely to get a sharper image because of its close proximity.
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