With my brother Peter freshly dropped off at Camp Hog Island in Maine, Mom, Dad, and I made our way back to our Air BnB in Pemaquid. Even though I wasn’t going to bird camp, I was just as excited. With the help of Hunt’s Photo and Video, I found myself with a shiny new Nikon Z9 for the trip. Once back at our place for the next couple of days, I took note of an Ovenbird singing away from a spruce bough just outside the kitchen window. Every now and then, it would pop a little farther back into the forest behind the house, giving me a great opportunity to plop down on a rock in the yard looking directly down into the spruce the Ovenbird was singing from. Only a few minutes later he popped back in and began singing away. Now, this afternoon it wasn’t particularly sunny, and the cloudy light wasn’t very soft, it was just quite flat. Taking that into consideration, I took a few photos testing out the Z9’s Animal-Eye 3D Autofocus mode that my Z6ii did not have. Quite frankly, I wasn’t really thinking about much other than just getting sharp shots of the bird as it sang, so I knew the next morning I needed to be out early to capture the bird in better light, and doing interesting things.
The next morning I was out just after the sun started poking over the horizon and through the trees with the intention of getting shots of this bird in full action. Soon enough, he flew into the spruce, popped in and out of a few other nearby trees, and sang in front of where I sat myself for over an hour. There were a few different ways in which I could use the early morning light to create a really cool atmosphere, one being the sun directly shining onto the bird and not at the background at all, creating a very dark background, and a nicely lit bird.
Notice where the bird is sitting on this branch here? Take a look at the bottom right caption.
About 15 minutes before that, when the light was softer and a little pinker, the bird was sitting in the exact same spot, almost in the exact same position.
As the sun rose higher and started to burn off some of the early morning fog, the light poked through gaps and holes in the spruce boughs, almost spotlighting the bird. Super cool to see, and even cooler to photograph this Ovenbird in.
While all of this was going on, I was thinking really hard about catching the bird flicking its wings, sticking its tail up, opening its bill to sing, etc. There was so much this bird was doing over the hour(ish) I spent with it, and I didn’t just want a portrait of it sitting in the tree.
Another thing I started to realize after a little while was the fact that the bird started to just not care about me sitting there. At a few points, it would run straight down the branch I was sitting at the end of, leading to a couple of really interesting shots.
A lot of what went into this session was patience and knowing exactly what I wanted to see, and I think it paid off. At this point in time, I hadn’t really done a whole lot of sitting down with one individual bird and working with it as it naturally was behaving. I think this set of images really shows how interesting these birds are other than tossing leaves around dense forest floor thickets, and bobbing up and down when they’re walking on sidewalks in cities.
