Top 200 Photos: #168


A bird in this Top 200 Photo.

photo #168 is:
90 Degrees

This is one of my best bird photos both from a subject standpoint and a technical standpoint. Birds are exceptionally hard to photograph. All animals are hard as they’re more unpredictable than humans, but birds are exceptionally frantic. It’s probably partly because they have a few predators and partly because they need to constantly eat because of their high metabolisms. So it’s hard to capture a bird tack sharp like this one. It’s made a little harder by the fact that my camera’s old so I can’t boost the ISO high enough to get a nice, fast shutter speed.

I was also lucky to catch the nuthatch in this pose. This is the canonical nuthatch pose – you’ll almost always see them depicted this way in guide books. Of all the birds we have in our yard, I think nuthatches make up the smallest percentage of the population.