Mike Lentz Nature Photography

The best photos in the popular style can offer pleasing compositions. Nonetheless, I mention composition here because I see many bird photographers buy a good camera and a big lens and then use them to produce frame-filling images of a bird with a clean background. With good equipment and decent technique, this is not that hard to do for many species. More importantly, it rarely makes for a very interesting photograph. Sure, you have the nice colors and details of the bird but in a more abstract sense, all you have is a big, vaguely roundish to oblong shape on top of a horizontal line. This is not all that intriguing in terms of composition! Thinking about composition when taking your photo, however, indicates that you are thinking like an artist, which makes sense. After all, isn’t it the beauty of birds that attracted us to photograph them in the first place?

A good composition can come in the form of a more loosely framed photograph that includes some surrounding elements. But it can just as easily present itself in a tight graphic shot of a bird’s face. Simply filling the frame with a full body shot of a perched or even flying bird, however, makes it less likely that you will have a pleasing composition unless the bird’s pose itself adds some compositional interest.