Birding and photography. For me, they are inextricably connected. At the ripe age of 53, they are the two adjectives that best describe who I am. From the moment I wake in the morning to the instant a fall asleep, there’s a good chance that the thoughts fluttering about in my mind are somehow related to one or both of these things.
Often, it’ll be something like this…
…that keeps my mind fired up.
With these sort of shots, there is always a question. Not some lofty rhetorical or biological question, but one that weighs incessantly on my mind, nonetheless. How do I get more shots like this?
A perfectly lit bird perched on a tree limb is fine. Once in a while. It has quite possibly been done to death, but it can still be a perfectly legitimate way to engage with nature. It’s all about whatever brings you joy, right?
My particular joy stems from always trying to do things a bit differently. To always be challenging myself. To always be thinking outside the proverbial box.
A box that most of the time is a cage.
Nobody’s got time for that nonsense, right? So I’m always striving to capture birds in odd and surprising ways, and to be constantly steering clear of anything too conventional.
It wasn’t always this way.
Photography had never been a goal of mine. I wanted to be a writer. Or a filmmaker. Or both.
For the most part, photography came out of nowhere. Like a bloated housefly that smacks into your face on a hot and lazy summer day.
I had a very basic digital camera – a lowly 6 MP Canon – as far back as 2006. I used it occasionally, but I never once considered calling myself a photographer. There were no moments where I thought to myself: I need to take cool photos! And I need to take them all the f’ing time!
No, that would come much, much later.
I did take one cool shot with that little Canon, though:
FYI, I have mild arachnophobia, but I still love spiders to death. I will take spider photos every chance I get, lol!
Anyway…
Everything began to change for me in the early summer of 2015. Late June/early July-ish. This was following on the heels of the dissolution of a long and unhappy marriage. As one often does, I found myself in a strange, often surreal, and unequivocally dichotomous state of being in those first few months of newfound bachelorhood.
The lifting of a tremendous weight was certainly a feeling that I welcomed. At the same time, it was an incredibly difficult life change to navigate, both mentally and emotionally. This was the first time in twenty years that I was completely on my own. Gone entirely was that – for better or worse – emotional tether that for so long had been an integral part of my being.
I’m pretty sure I described it to a friend at the time as feeling like I had stepped onto a tightwire suspended across a chasm so deep and wide that it was impossible to see the bottom.
I had made my choice, however. Ending that unfortunate relationship had been entirely my decision, and come what might, I was hellbent on sticking it out.
As spring rolled into summer that year, there was one thing I knew above all else: that I did not want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary sitting alone in my new bachelor pad. I had taken up walking a few months earlier and I was desperate to elevate my outdoor time to the next level.
My initial plan was to simply spend as much as possible wandering around and exploring the city and province that I had neglected for so long.
I’m pretty hazy on what precisely led me to make this decision, but somehow I hit upon the idea that I needed a good camera to take with me on all my wanderings. The little Canon that I had wouldn’t cut it, though. I needed something way more substantial.
Which, given that I knew virtually nothing about cameras at the time, meant going with the first thing I found that was both inexpensive and gave the appearance of being a decent camera. This meant an all-in-one Sony, one of those silly contraptions that combines a camera body and zoom lens into a single unit. This one, to be exact:
From the get-go, this thing just didn’t feel right. Sure, one could take photos with it. Even some half-decent ones if some effort were put into it. But some part of me knew, even without having done any research whatsoever, that no professional photographer on Earth would ever use the sort of rig I had just bought.
I decided to sit on it for a few days, though. It seemed best to not make any more rash decisions without first letting the whole photography-as-a-hobby thing stew for a bit.
After less than a week, I felt fairly confident of two things: one) that I was in fact interested in getting into photography, and two) that if the former was truly the case, that I really needed to start off on the right foot.
So back to the store I went with that Sony. As luck would have it, the store was running a sale on Nikon kits just then. For not much more than I had paid for the Sony, I was able to grab a Nikon D3200 and an 18-55mm lens. This combo seemed very much like the direction I wanted to head in.
I won’t belabour my first experience trying to shoot with this camera. The Nikon was waaayy more advanced than the Sony. In spite of its status as an entry-level camera, it was the real deal. Most of the bells and whistles found on modern professional digital cameras were there. And I knew very little about how to use them.
Honestly, it was kind of hilarious that first time out. I still have in my photo library the first batch of photos I shot. They sort of resemble real photos, but yeah…they were just bad.
And they would continue to be generally bad for quite some time.
Oh well, it didn’t matter one iota. Not then, when I was still a million miles from figuring out what I even wanted out of photography. No, what mattered was that I was getting outside. A lot. And it felt very much like the camera was giving me even greater incentive to spend time out of doors.
Given my mental and emotional state at the time (not so good, haha), that’s exactly what I needed to get me through.
But.
This being a pretty good sized but.
Before long – as in…within less than a month, I think – I realized that I needed something else to help me along.
That 18-55 lens was totally fine for shooting landscapes. Which I genuinely loved to shoot. But (here it is) what about all the more distant subjects that were catching my eye on every single trip I made out into the field? What about the birds and other distant wildlife I was seeing on my excursions?
Many of my trips then were to Nova Scotia’s eastern coastline. To beaches both rocky and sandy. To nooks and crannies both hidden and not-so-hidden. Just as often, I would spend entire afternoons exploring the system of trails that crisscross Halifax, Dartmouth, and the surrounding area.
Without fail, I would spy all sorts of fascinating critters on those trips. Given the locales I haunted, birds were unsurprisingly quite abundant.
Here’s the thing that’s really interesting about this particular phase of my life:
In no way could I have been described as a birder then. I liked birds in general, in the same way that I liked nature and all animals in general. But I didn’t give them a whole lot of thought.
They were not on my radar other than as possible photographic subjects. Identifying the birds I saw certainly wasn’t on my to-do list. And I never once went out specifically to look for birds. Yet I always noticed them. Every single time that a bird popped into my field of view, I wanted a photo of said bird.
Within a matter of just a few weeks, these moments of birds flitting across my path or perching in a nearby bush became minute exercises in frustration. I knew I could never get an even halfway decent shot of a bird with my current lens.
What was I to do?
Hmm…well…there was an obvious and simple solution. Yeah, it was time for some additional visual reach.
A big zoom lens was out of the question at that point. I simply didn’t have the funds. For the time being, I decided I could probably settle for something a little less extreme.
Once again I lucked out. The exact lens I needed to complement my 18-55 was on sale at that precise moment. A reasonably priced 55-300mm lens would do very nicely, thank you very much!
Looking back now at the first photos I took with that new lens is really fascinating. Not in any sort of objective way, but simply in terms of what those photos reveal about the trajectory of my life at the time.
Here’s the very first shot I ever took with the new zoom lens. It’s an atrocious photo, but it’s oh so telling:
© 2026 by Pop Culture Birding.
Yup, it’s literally a bunch of birds hanging out on the rocks. Mostly Double-crested Cormorants, but there’s also an American Herring Gull and a few tough-to-identify ducks (lower left) that might be American Black Ducks, but I can’t say for sure from that terrible photo.
What’s so ridiculously obvious from this and a whole bunch of other shots taken that day is that I was drawn to birds far more so than just about any other subject at that time. I was snapping pics of literally every bird I could find. Wherever a bird appeared, my camera followed.
I’m fairly convinced that some as-yet-to-be-discovered part of my psyche – maybe my whole being – knew even then exactly where I wanted to take my photography.
And I think it’s pretty darn cool to recognize that now.
I did manage to get one shot that day that I kind of sort of maybe liked. Looking at it now, it’s a fairly mundane shot, especially by my current standards. As a pure ‘photograph’, there isn’t all that much to it. I love the subject, though: a Ruddy Turnstone.
A bird I would not see again until I ventured to Panama in 2023.
© 2026 by Pop Culture Birding.
To be continued…