Intimate Portraits of Birds of Prey

The National Centre for Birds of Prey

On Tuesday Sheryl and I spent the day with our friends Mike and Lynne, who stopped by on their way home after visiting the North East. We met up at the National Centre for Birds of Prey (NCBP) in Helmsley, just an hour or so away from us. The NCBP has a good collection of birds and offers frequent flying demonstrations.

I decided to deploy my Sigma 150-600mm lens but, because I’ve been before and understood the layout at the NCBP, chose to use a Nikon D800 rather than the usual D5300 that I use for wildlife photography.

The D5300 and 150-600mm combination has phenomenal reach, but at the NCBP it’s not needed. Conversely, its 225mm equivalent wide end is too long for the NCBP, for shooting birds in aviaries or on display. The D800 works better here as well, because the lens/camera combination enables a shallower depth of field which can be quite beneficial in close environments.

Nikon D800; Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Contemporary

I kept the D5300 with me, and attached the 17-35mm f/2.8 that usually sits on one D800, so that I could shoot more environment-friendly images to capture events of our day out but, in the event, barely used it at all. Being a light body (480g) meant that carrying it around just in case was little to no burden. The 17-35mm is a huge and relatively heavy lens and absolutely dwarfs the D5300, but the resulting images are solid. Nevertheless, for a simple walkabout set-up, for the sake of additional weight-saving, I’d have been at least as happy using the kit AF-P 18-55mm.

I’ve written at length in the past about the distinction between my wildlife documentary photography and my lifestyle documentary photography, and particularly in my post Memories vs Photographs, about the difference.

On this trip, I think I’ve successfully navigated this conundrum with a series of intimate portraits of these birds of prey. The dilemma for me was in the presentation of an image that appeared to be of a wild animal, in the wild, but which was in fact in captivity. This time, the images are so contrived that I imagine there is little to no chance of anyone, even by omission, being led to believe that these birds were photographed in the wild. Well, I hope not, anyway!

The birds in this gallery were all photographed either through bars or mesh of an aviary, or while tethered on posts in the grounds of the NCBP, and I’m extremely happy with them.