Getting up close with the garden birds

It has been a while since we have been out photographing in the garden and this week I have set myself the challenge of photographing remotely, in the hopes of getting up close with the birds visiting the garden this summer.

Before we get into the remote shooting segment of this blog, I wanted to give you all a quick update on the garden as I haven’t done one at all in 2026, and the main reason for that is, not much has happened.

I had high hopes for the bird box we set out last year, as over winter we did have a blue tit regularly visiting overnight, but alas, we had absolutely no visitors in spring and so no nesting birds. We did have a disturbing visit from a hornet, but luckily, I was in Scotland at the time so didn’t have to deal with it.

Birdfy sent me their Bird Nest Duo to try out, which I set up as soon as it arrived in the copper beech tree over the other side of the garden. I added an additional router in the garden shed to get internet over to the end of the garden so that it would connect and then it was onto waiting and hoping that something would choose to nest in it. Initially we had some visits from some Blue Tits, but again, nothing chose to settle in the box. Now this I think was down to how late it ended up going out in the garden, as I said I put it out as soon as it arrived, however that wasn’t until the beginning of April, so I think a lot of birds may have chosen their nest sites already. Another thing that I think may have put them off was the hole size. The box came with a lot of different hole options, I chose to keep the smallest one on their as the guide said this was rated for coal and blue tits, but I think it was just a bit too small and should have gone up a hole size. Also, while there is a great inset ladder inside the box, to help the birds climb up and out, there isn’t anything on the outside and I did notice in the few clips we did get of the birds visiting, they looked like they struggled to land. I will be bringing it in soon, and before it goes out next year, I will be adding a perch to it outside the entrance in the hopes of making this a more attractive option for the nesting birds. I am hopeful that next year we will get some nesting action, and I may just deploy the Birdfy to make sure they choose that one, as it has a built in feature to allow for live streaming on YouTube, which was a feature I was hoping to make use of.

Skylar played a role in the nesting season this year, by donating some of her fur for the birds to use as nesting material. I placed it in one of the bird feeders we weren’t using and they were able to take what they wanted. While they didn’t use it in our boxes, it was nice to know that there were bits of Skylar fluff over the local area keeping eggs warm this spring.

While we may not have had any bird nesting action this year, the garden was by no means empty. We have had a very hot and dry summer so I have been keeping the bird bath clean and filled up for the birds to take advantage of. We have had visits from crows, many magpies, robins, tits and even woodpeckers which has been great to see.

We also had some almost owl visits! The first was at the beginning of spring, I let Skylar out for a before bed pee, and looking right at me from the top of the hawthorn was an owl! We were both very surprised to see each other and it didn’t stay for long, flying off out into the field behind the house. Unfortunately I have not seen or heard from it since which is a shame.

There was also a visit from a tawny owl, that I saw one night perched on top of the telegraph pole just outside the garden. Again, it was really late so no images were possible, but it was great to see. I did put my trail camera out facing the woodpecker posts in the hopes that maybe the owls were coming in and using them as perches, but unfortunately, it didn’t capture any owls, just a lot of magpies and crows.

Circling back to where we started this blog post with the remote shooting, this all came about as I found a hole in the back of the garden. Wanting to know who (if anyone) lived there, I set the trail camera up and was very happy to see a vole! Wanting to try and get an image of this, I set up a tripod outside the hole in the hopes that it would get used to it. It did and seemed to be coming out regularly between 6 and 7 am so I got up at the crack of sparrows to get up my camera and attempt to get some images. I knew that this would require me not actually pressing the button, so set up my camera with the Sony Creators’ App and sat down the stairs out of view from the hole, but still within range for the phone to stay connected to the camera. I waited for over an hour, and unfortunately the vole was a no show.

Not wanting to waste my early start (I got up at 5:30 am), I instead chose to focus on the birds. I had set up an old tripod I had laying around a few weeks earlier near to the woodpecker posts, and had been popping in some suet to attract the birds in and get them used to a tripod. The had taken that in their stride so I was easily able to add in another tripod, this time with my A7v and the 70-200 GM ii lens to take some images. I set this up in various positions around the main post, trying my best to frame up where I thought the birds would be and not cut their heads or tails off (though this did happen…). Once again I linked my camera to the creators’ app via Bluetooth, and went to sit at the top of the garden out the way from the birds, but within sight of the camera for the Bluetooth to stay connected.

This setup worked really well, and I was able to get some great images of the birds closer than I would ever be able to without using this method. The camera and phone worked great together and I sat out for over 3 hours taking images of the birds, before the sun got too high. When it was quiet and the birds had moved off, I was able to go in and move the camera to a new position, making sure I got both vertical and horizontal images for a bit of variety.

For the most part I was at 1/1600s, at f2.8 – f4 and in auto ISO. I had the camera set to 30fps and had pre-capture on, which still works through the app. For the focus mode, I was in the tracking mode and then used a mix of the Zone and XL areas, bird AF was on and as I had set the touch to focus on, I could move the focus point as needed. Through the app I was also able to change any of my focus modes, mostly setting the exposure comp from 0 to -0.3 and -0.7 to make sure the whites on the birds wouldn’t get blown out.

I had set myself up as well as I thought I could have, however, using this method a few things happen the main one being, you get a lot (and I mean a lot) of images. I took a little over 3500 on my stint in the garden and this was down to a few things, my settings (remember I was at 30fps and had pre-capture on), as well as a bit of lag time between setting the shutter off on the camera and it then repeating this on the camera. Part of this is the UI in the app, you have to slide the capture button to take images when in anything other than single shot, which is slow to do so you end up with allllll the images. This point also leads me into the next which is having a lot of empty images where the birds have flown off, and you aren’t quick enough to stop the shutter and having a huge amount of out of focus images. I think the latter is down to the fact that as you are shooting through an app, you are just not able to react as fast as if you had the camera in your hand (I think this will be the case for the Nikon and Canon remote apps as well).

With all my images taken, it was onto the culling process, this took FOREVER due to just the amount of images I had to go through (part the reason I am not usually trigger happy). I first took out all the empty frames, followed by out of focus images, and then due to shooting at 30fps there were a lot of very similar images, so I picked my favourites and got it whittled down to 43 images to actually edit which I think wasn’t too bad.

Overall, I am really happy with this set up and will be using it more often, I’d like to be able to get the woodpeckers and corvids that visit, but they are too shy to be out when I am in the garden, so I am going to have to find a better way of concealing myself – the corvids aren’t daft and wont come in even when I am in my chair hide. I would like to try it also with different lenses, like my more wide angle options, and I am still after that vole!

This was a great way to spend the morning, and I can highly recommend giving remote shooting a go, each brand has their own app so if your not on Sony you can still give this a try.