Whenever I visit Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls I try to focus my visit on a particular bird or something new in terms of technique. During our recent reader event I took the opportunity to try using extension tubes to photograph small birds. Anyone who has visited Bird Kingdom can attest to the fact that the small bird aviary can be a challenging place to capture images of small birds as they tend to be fast moving and rather skittish.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge

During my recent visit I also captured a few reptile images like the turtle above, as well some snake images through the glass partitions of the enclosures, but it was the small birds that I really wanted to focus on.

In the past I’ve only had marginal success getting any usable images so I was determined to try something a bit different with this visit. I decided to use a 16 mm Movo extension tube with my Nikon 1 V2 and Nikon 1 30-110 mm f/3.8-5.6 zoom lens. This would give me some additional magnification effect while still allowing the lens to focus from a reasonable distance.

Of course I still missed a ton of shots due to the birds’ erratic behaviours but I did get some usable images.

I found that if I remained motionless the birds would come back to the tree on which I was concentrating, and if I moved slowly enough I could at least try to capture an image.

I used single point auto-focus with my Nikon 1 V2 which allowed me to quickly place my focusing point without having to focus and recompose. Using the extension tube did limit my ability to adjust the framing on my subjects so some of them ended up not being ideal.

As always, the auto-focusing with my Nikon 1 gear was fast and accurate. This allowed me, at times, to capture a few images before my subject bird darted away.

I even lucked into a bit of a ‘creative’ image…

Which was created with the help of this little guy…

Overall, I had pretty decent success using the 16 mm Movo extension tube with my Nikon 1 gear and I’ll definitely use this approach with future visits.

I will need to experiment stopping down my lens a tad to see if I can get a bit better depth of field while not losing too much image sharpness and clarity.

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Article and all images Copyright Thomas Stirr. All rights reserved. No use, duplication of any kind, or adaptation is allowed without written consent.