So now that you are doing set-ups and choosing your own perches, have you given any thought as to what angle you place the perch around your set-up?

Well I have been playing around with this for many years. Here’s what I have settled on doing.

If you place the perch going away from you, the bird will land with his side to you. I call this the field guide pose

This image of a Worm-eating Warbler shows the bird in good position, but I feel that the perch running up through the frame is distracting. I also do not like the perch vegatation extending from the back.
The thing I dislike the most is that unless you are shooting at f16, the near and furthest part of the perch will be out-of-focus.

If we place the perch parallel to the camera plane, the the bird will land facing you or with his back to you.

The perch is now all in focus and no part of the perch is running through the bird. But how can we get the perch to look like this and the bird to look like it does in the image with the perch set away from us?

Well, what I have discovered after many hours doing this is that even though the bird will land with his back to you or facing you full on……

It’s only a matter of seconds before the birds does what I call the “twist”. All small birds move on the perch this way.
If you give them a few seconds, they will either turn back when they want to move along the perch.

Now you have the best of both worlds. The perch is nice and sharp and all in focus. No part of the perch is extending out of the bird and the bird is parallel to the camera plane showing that field guide pose.
So when I set my perches up around my feeders and drip ponds, I set them parallel to the camera and wait for that “twist”.

All images are the copyright of Alan Murphy Photography.

© 2009 Alan Murphy Photography

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 2:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.