My favorite bird shots of 2022

Last year I got a new camera, the OM System OM-1. One of the main motivations was to be able to take better pictures of the various little birdies in our garden. The OM-1 has great subject detection for birds: it’ll find the bird in the frame, find its eye, and latch on to it. This makes it a lot easier to get decent photos.

In addition, the smaller micro-four-thirds sensor has a 2x “crop-factor”. In practice, it means longer reach with smaller lenses (at the expense of more depth of field and image noise, but let’s not get into the whole topic equivalence). The lens is a Panasonic Leica 100-400mm. It’s quite compact, sharp, and has a loooong reach, perfect for birds.

Below a selection of my favorites from last year. You can find most of them also on my Instagram account.

Bird from the garden

One of the more regular visitor are Robins but we have a bunch of other cute little critters visiting regularly

A Hoopoe sneaked into our garden once too, unfortunately haven’t seen it back yet

Bird of Prey and vultures

There are a few nice spots not too far away from Barcelona to photograph the big birds. One worth highlighting the bird center Cim d’Àligues, which has quite a few eagles, hawks, owls, vultures and more. The flight sessions are a great way to capture photos of these beautiful animals in flight.

Here’s an African vulture in action:

And a Turkey vulture:

Owls

I love these birds. The big eyes together with the head tilts often create funny expressions.