“What kind of camera do you use?” “What settings”? “Oh, there is an annoying pattern of visual noise appearing above ISO …” We all know this and I myself am guilty as charged to be a gear-nerd from time to time. But there is a lot more to photography than gear. And there is a lot more to gear than bodies and lenses.
So I will try to surprise you in this section. Let me start with my number one favourite piece of bird photography kit.
This beautifully illustrated compendium tells you nearly everything you need to know about European birdlife. It makes your watching and shooting experience less random. And as boring as it may sound. You have to know your subject, right?
There are a lot of useful tools to learn birds and its behaviour online, but overall I know none that contains so much dense information.
Regardless, I want to mention two additional tools that are very useful for me:
First of all, there is ornitho.de - over 150,000 users report their bird sightings to the site. This information is not only invaluable to ornithologists of all sorts but as well to photographers or birdwatchers (at least within the covered area), because it helps you identifying the best spots. Secondly there is the “Schweizerische Vogelwarte Sempach”, which boasts an easy-to-use database of all sorts of bird-songs and -calls. This makes sense, because more often than not, you hear a bird before you see it.
1) Lars Svensson, Killian Mullarney, Dan Zetterström, Der Kosmos Vogelführer. Alle Arten Europas, Nordafrikas und Vorderasiens (3rd ed.) [this is German, but English versions exist].
2) www.ornitho.de
3) www.vogelwarte.ch