Photographing Purple Herons of the Disappearing Wetlands of Gurgaon

The Basai Wetland of Gurgaon is an amazing place for wildlife photography, especially waterbirds. Incidentally, the wetland that is fast shrinking, (thanks to unplanned developmental activities) is a favourite nesting site for Purple Heron, those large, majestic birds that are a photographer's delight. Incidentally, I used a Canon 1500D camera with a 55-250 mm IS lens and shot these snaps in the RAW format. I used a shutter speed of 1/4000.

While this blogpost is more about photographic techniques, it also brings out the beauty of nature. But then, to come to the art of photographing moving objects, especially flying birds, it is important to develop the skill of tracking flying birds early on, tracking them, and knowing when to press the shutter. In the above photograph, I had been tracking the bird for quite some time and then decided to press the shutter when the bird was flying with a building in the background. I needed this effect-having a blurred background and a sharp image of the bird. In order to have the desired depth of field or blurring of the background, I chose an aperture varying from 5.6 to 7.1 with 6.3 being a sure shot aperture.

For me, as a photographer of flying birds, it is very important to have the sun in the right direction, preferable in a direction that will bring out the eye bird nicely in focus. If you zoom in on the photographs, you will notice that the eye of the bird has come out nicely in the photographs. I would have put my best photograph at the beginning of the post but then I realised that the best should be towards the end of the post and so I am sharing one of my good snaps.

A brief word about the camera - I guess any kind of a DSLR should come up tops for photographing flying birds. However, it is important to have a zoom lens that has a minimum focal length of 250 mm. Any Lens having less than 250 mm of focal length will be a compromise. Regarding the focusing mode, I use the Auto-focus mode with the central focal point and I use a combination of  AI-Focus or One-Shot Focus.