Trogon Photo Tours

JANUARY 2016 - This month's newsletter features images of 5 of the 6 species of Kingfisher which live in the Americas, most of the images were taken in the Pantanal of Brazil.  It includes information on photographing them and the settings and goals for each photo.  

Amazon Kingfisher photographed August 2015 at Pousada Piuval, Mato Grosso, Brazil.  Canon 5D3 500F4 1.4x 1/5000 F8, iso 800, evaluative metering -0.3, handheld.  The Amazon Kingfisher is a fairly common bird in South America, it's about the size of our Belted Kingfisher.  I was able to get on this one as it zipped past me at Pousada Piuval, this was photographed about 10:30 am on a bright sunny day.  Despite the conditions I left my iso at 800 as the 5D3 has very little noise and I want to be prepared opportunities like this one, these guys fly very fast.   

Amazon Kingfisher photographed August 2015 at Pousada Piuval, Mato Grosso, Brazil.  Canon 5D3 500F4 1/4000 F7.1, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.3, handheld.  We spent some time at Pousada Piuval working with this kingfisher as it kept flying from it's perch and diving into the water after fish.  This is quite a good sized crop but I don't put on my teleconverter when attempting this shot because I find it slows down focus too much and you need the autofocus to respond extremely quickly to get this shot.  In this case I wait for the kingfisher to hit the water, then I immediately focus on the spot where he went in and start firing, all the time keeping my finger on the AF button.  Despite the size of the crop the bird is quite sharp when viewed at 100%.  I also use a fair bit of depth of field on this shot because the place where the kingfisher initially hits the water and the place he comes out are not going to be in the same exact focal plane.  Ideally the AF catches up with the bird but I give myself a lot more margin for error if I use a greater depth of field. And of course these birds are moving very fast when they come out of the water so you need a lot of shutter speed.  I used a centered composition because the splash balances the frame and the reflection works well centered. 

Ringed Kingfisher, male photographed August 2015 at Econtro Das Aguas State Park, Brazil.  Canon 5D3 500F4 1/5000 F6.3, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering at -1.0 exposure compensation, handheld.  The Ringed Kingfisher is the largest kingfisher in the Americas measuring about 16 inches.  We photographed this male from a boat in the Pantanal.  Due to the whites and the sunlight that I was shooting in I dialed in -1.0 exposure comp to keep the whites from blowing out against the medium toned green background.  Again I was using iso 800 to keep my shutter speed up and try to capture the action if he took off.  

Green Kingfisher, female photographed August 2015, Econtro Das Aguas State Park, Mato Grosso, Brazil.  Canon 7D2 500F4 1/125 F4.5, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering -1.0, handheld from boat.  This female Green Kingfisher was very patient with us and let us approach very closely.  We took lots of images of her, in this case I started out at iso 1600, looked at some images on my lcd which I thought were sharp and then dropped the iso to 800.  In this case she was in a shaded area and there was no chance of getting enough speed to get an action shot so I used the lowest iso I thought I could get away with and get a sharp image in the situation.  My approach to iso selection and shutter speed have a lot to do with both the lighting conditions and the shot I am trying to achieve.  If there is enough light I will almost always try to keep the shutter speed high enough to get an action shot but in a dark area I will often shoot at quite a low shutter speed because I know there is no chance to get an action shot and I want to maximize the image quality.  This is in contrast to some photographers who use auto iso and end up shooting at low iso's in bright light and very high iso's in low light.  For example if I had set my camera to auto iso at something like 1/1000 of a second in the first image of the Amazon Kingfisher racing past my iso would have been 160 and I wouldn't have had enough speed to stop the kingfisher in flight.  In contrast on this image of the female Green Kingfisher I would have been at iso 6400 and the image would be unusable due to being overly noisy and of poor overall quality. 

Green Kingfisher, male photographed August 2015, Econtro Das Aguas State Park, Mato Grosso, Brazil.  Canon 7D2 500F4 1/3200 F6.3, iso 800, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.3, handheld from boat.  Here is the male Green Kingfisher, the Green lives all the way from South Texas to Argentina and measures about 8 inches.  The contrasty harsh lighting hurts this image some, I should have used fill flash on it but I didn't have my flash on at this point. Contrast this image and the next one which was also taken on a sunny day but with fill flash.

Green Kingfisher, male photographed September 2007, Ibera Marshes, Argentina.  Canon 20D 500F4 1/1000 F5.6, iso 400, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.3, 580ex fill flash at -1.3.  Here's a much better male Green Kingfisher from quite a few years ago in another great wetland location for bird photography, the Ibera Marshes of Argentina.  In this case I balanced the bright sunlight by adding fill flash. 

American Pygmy Kingfisher, male photographed January 2012 at Napo Wildlife Center, Ecuador.  Canon 7D 500F4, 1/25 F4, iso 800, Av mode, 0 exposure compensation.  Shot from boat with Gitzo tripod, wimberley head.  This was a very difficult shot with what was luckily a very patient bird.  I really didn't like the original 7D at over iso 800.  So I locked up the tripod head and shot this wide open, I would have liked to stop down a bit but I needed to maximize what little shutter speed I had at this point. We photographed this species on our Brazil Pantanal trip as well but I was in the back of the boat and didn't get anything worth showing.  So that made it 4 out of the 5 South American kingfishers that we were able to photograph on last year's Brazil tour. The only one we missed was the Green and Rufous Kingfisher.

Belted Kingfisher, female photographed July 2010 Titlow County Park, Tacoma, WA.  Canon 1D3 500F4 1/2000 F5.6, iso 640, Av mode, evaluative metering at 0.  This is one of my favorite images of our only common North American kingfisher, the Belted which measures about 12 inches.  This was taken just at last light so I didn't need any negative exposure compensation to hold the whites against the bright sky. Titlow Park was my favorite location in Washington state to photograph kingfishers and I spent many hours there working on flight shots of them.

I like to photograph kingfishers out in open areas where I can get flight shots and have a chance for fishing shots etc.  But one effective way of photographing them is to set up a blind near a perch they use often.  They are wary birds and this gives you a chance to get closer to them.