July 17, 2016 - Baltimore Orioles

This spring we again had some Baltimore Orioles arrive to nest in our area. The males are such gorgeous birds I always try to get some photos of them. Today I’ll show you how I’ve begun to apply some of the lessons from the Texas workshop I attended in February.

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First, I took an old stump and put it in our yard, placing it so that the background was a nice area of green grass. I dug up a patch of grass and placed it on the stump. In spring, Orioles love grape jelly and oranges. I put a cup of jelly and an orange half on the stump but just out of view (so I thought). Orioles started coming to the food right away and I started snapping photos. After looking at them in my viewfinder, I realized there was a lot of distracting grass in front of the bird.

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Before taking any more photos, I went out and trimmed the grass stems. I also realized that the jelly cup and the orange were showing (see the last photo) so I did a better job of hiding them. Those improvements gave me much cleaner shots like this one.

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Another strategy we used at the workshop was to incorporate local vegetation into our photos. I found some blooming shrubs in our yard, cut off a few branches, and mounted them near our oriole feeder. Birds like to land near a feeder and look around to make sure there is no threat before they actually start eating. These flowering branches gave the birds the landing spots they wanted and gave me some nice additions to my photos.

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Here’s another setup using branches from our flowering shrub.

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This is a cute picture with the Oriole peeking through a forked branch. The next two pictures show how this was achieved.

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This larger view shows that I used an orange half stuck on a branch to give the Oriole a feeding spot. In retrospect, I think I should have placed the orange on the end of the branch that leaves the frame on the left side. Then more of the tiny, fresh leaves would have been included in my photos. Oh well, there’s always next time!

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An even wider view of the scene shows that the branch was stuck into the handle of an old tripod. That gave it some support and allowed it to be close to the ground. The green grass in back was far enough away so it gave a smooth, blurred-out background to the photo.

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This photo, using the same setup, shows the back and wings of a male Oriole. Note the small amount of black in the tail. That tells me it was a different bird than the one shown in the third photo. This bird is probably not as mature as the other one.

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This photo was also taken in our yard but not at one of my setups. It’s still a nice photo, but illustrates some of the challenges when taking bird photos in a more “natural” setting. On a sunny day, light is often diffused so shadows may become a problem. Also the background can be more cluttered when you aren’t controlling it.

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