I imagine that many years ago, it was very difficult for people to be able to shoot photos of landscapes. And the same goes for shooting portraits. But lots of tools have made it easier. Landscape photography became technically easier with tools like compositional lines, dynamic range editing, color editing, etc. Similarly, portrait photography became so much simpler to do with face and eye detection. After the tools became available, you needed to just rely on your own creativity and imagination. Yet still, so many photographers just let the cameras do the work for them. And these days, bird photography has become the same thing.
Let me explain what I mean. I, the legally blind Editor in Chief of the Phoblographer, can photograph birds. And what’s really helped me be able to do that well is scene detection. I was already able to photograph wild animals and pets pretty easily. But birds are a different thing. And now, there’s so many bird photographers around and so many of them are happy with just getting the eyes in focus and capturing the bird doing absolutely nothing.
Enough is enough. There are tons of images of waxwings simply just hanging out on branches. Now it’s time to work to capture or create unique photographs.
A while back, I remember seeing the images of a photographer who purposely shot images of birds at a slower shutter speed so that they looked like they were all blurs in the scene. And it was truly something different, unique, and lovely in an artistic sense. There are so many images of birds that are tack sharp—but not enough where photographers are actually creative or they’re doing something that isn’t typically seen by people. In other words, they’re not making photographs that look unique.
The reason why they’re all posting such standard photos is pretty simple: they’re shooting to please a social media algorithm. So thety have to constant post in order to be seen for a moment, only to be simply scrolled past.
So here’s what I’ve got say to bird photographers: please stop simply just posting everything you shoot. And here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- If you’ve seen a million bird photographs, what does this one do that’s unique?
- If you’ve seen a million photos of birds, will someone simply just scroll page this photo or will they sit and look at it?
- What about this image is not boring?
Think of it this way: have you ever looked at a photo of the city of Paris and then just clicked past it? Or have you ever looked at a portrait and then just clicked past it? Well, it’s easy to do that now with bird photography.
In the same way that someone can take a boring photo of a landscape or a boring portrait, you too can shoot a boring bird photograph.
