Composition and Birds in Flight

When it comes to flight shots, backgrounds really make a difference

Royal tern landing at La Jolla Cove, California (2025)

I contend that even with today’s amazing cameras with fast, subject-based autofocus systems, flying birds remain one of the toughest subjects to photograph. Heck, just getting the darned thing in the viewfinder is hard enough! I will say that the AF systems with subject detection and tracking have made “BIF” shots far more manageable than in the past. And if you do have a camera that will track subjects, like most newer mirrorless models, then it frees you up to think a little about composing your flight shots. While you can’t always get the framing you’d like, you can start to think about foreground and background elements.

Let’s take this shot for starters: a brown pelican in flight, with a good pose and wings up. It’s the kind of shot I’d have been extremely happy to get when I started trying to photograph birds. But if I’m going to be picky (and I am), I don’t like the background. It’s like the bird is just frozen in empty blue space, and while there’s good subject isolation here, there’s not much else going on.

Here’s a different shot from that same shoot. This time, I’m shooting from a slightly elevated position, and I have the waves in the background. The tern is positioned nicely in the frame, but the ocean behind it gives the shot a dynamic aspect that the previous one simply didn’t have.

Another tern, another dynamic background. Here, we’ve got the wave action but also a little bit of the foreground rocks to help anchor the scene. If anything, I framed the shot a little too tightly, as the wings are close to the top edge of the frame. Hey, you can fix that in Photoshop with Generative Expand, right? 😉

Sometimes, your background gets really interesting. Here’s a Heermann’s Gull approaching a landing spot as it passes over a colony of California sea lions. Fortunately, the shallow depth of field from using a long telephoto lens blurs the sea lions enough so that they don’t completely distract from the main subject.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “Hey, there aren’t any locations like that around here,” and unless you live in San Diego, you’re probably right. That’s just one reason why I lead my Ultimate Birds in Flight photo workshop there every January. The combination of Pacific coastal scenery combined with unique vantage points makes this one my top spots to not only master your camera settings but also get photos that are quite different than just a bird in a blue sky.