Although the impacts of COVID-19 were generally a challenge as my daily life changed completely, there were some advantages to it. As I explained in previous posts, I did several new activities that I didn’t have a lot of time for before lockdowns. Apart from exercising, cooking and baking, doing art and playing the trumpet, I also spent more time with my camera, photographing nature in my garden. I love nature photography and spend a lot of time doing it during my holidays, so it was fun to experiment with some photography at my home. Furthermore, together with other birding members of the OSC community, I did several ‘bird races’ – a friendly competition to record (by sight or sound) as many species as possible within a certain time. These could only be conducted from our homes of course, but it was actually fun because I added several species to my garden list. I also wrote a post about birding during lockdown in my birding blog.

I wanted to focus on a few aspects that I fell turn a regular wildlife shot into a more interesting and aesthetic photo, these are lighting and perspective. I often photograph birds just as a way to record my experiences and while it is a good way to capture memorable sightings, the photos would not look overly interesting to someone who doesn’t know what they mean to me personally. A Spotted Dove coming to drink at our pool was a chance to photograph it from a low angle. I feel that photos look much better when they are on eye-level with the animal instead of from the perspective from which one sees the world normally.

Spotted Dove.

I tried to photograph birds in flight or in action in other ways, but this was very hard and I did not get quite the photos I wanted. A real challenge was that the lens I am using is an old manual focus lens from my father (I bought my own lens two years ago but it got stolen in a burglary) which makes it challenging to adjust the focus on a fast-moving object.

A Black-hooded Oriole in flight.

The Black-hooded Oriole above was photographed on one of the first days of me trying to photograph birds in flight. It looks like a dart as it closed it wings for a split second which is quite interesting, but the bird is not completely in focus. I took many photos, the great majority were out of focus because of the manual focus though. After several days, I finally managed a few acceptable pics:

The Indian Pond-Heron and Spotted Dove were two examples of photos that were slightly better but I still struggled to get a perfectly clear shot. For the dove photo, I used Photoshop to cut out the dove and used another photo I took previously of a bird in a forest, blurred it, and inserted the dove to make it look as if it’s flying through the forest and the background is blurred. This was something I just did for fun once, usually I do not edit my photos apart from adjusting lighting and cropping them. A Shikra was photographed as it was close to eating the chicks out of a Black-hooded Oriole nest. Just as it peered into the nest however, the adult orioles managed to scare it away.

Once a beautiful Green Garden Lizard turned up in our house. I was amazed by its bright colors, and while it slowly made its way outside, I got my camera ready to photograph it as it rested on the edge of our pool, giving me the opportunity to get to eye-level with it. Using a wide aperture of f4.5, I could get the front and back of the image blurry.

Green Garden Lizard.

Photography was a fun way to spend time during the lockdown, not only as it was fun to observe birds in particular but also to be under the open sky. Photography in itself is always rewarding as it is often a combination of luck and skill, or knowledge and control of the camera.