My Worst bird photos of 2020

I take many terrible photos. Occasionally, I also take a few decent ones, and even more rarely, pretty good ones. A very wise photographer that I was lucky to have as a mentor once told me: “Only show your best photographs” and he was right – you need a consistent portfolio of images to be taken seriously. But I still take a lot of really quite average, not-great, terrible photos.

The classic “Not even remotely in focus”

Here’s the thing – everyone does. Not every photo is going to be a showstopper. My main advice for people wanting to improve their photography is simply to take lots of photos. It’s the photographer’s version of sketching, roughing out ideas until they come together in a finished work. You’re going to make a lot of crap on the way to making something good or even amazing. But you need to go through the process of making all of that crap to get there.

The “There was a bird here less than a second ago, I swear”

Everyone takes shitty photographs. Professional photographers take shitty photographs. Lots of them. The key is to learn from your shitty photographs and figure out how to take better ones. What went wrong? How can I stop that from going wrong next time?

Wildlife photographers take immense, uncountable numbers of shitty photographs. We’re searching for the ‘moment’ – when the action is at its peak, our subject is looking in the right direction, posed how we want. Digital photography lets us ‘spray and pray’ to try and capture these moments, shooting through the action to try and freeze the critical moment. We get hits – when everything is perfect! We also get many, many, many misses. Sometimes our focus point slips off into the background, or our subject does something unexpected, moves faster than we anticipated and quickly vacates the frame. I have so many photographs of branches that split-seconds before held birds, blurry bird-butts vanishing out of the frame, random patches of ocean where, I swear, there was a storm petrel a second ago!