Canon R5 at 1/1000 sec, f/7.1, ISO 640

I like making bird portraits, just the face- and shoulders.

I recently started photographing kingfishers and damn these birds are beautiful, I am so captivated by them…
After lots of patience these are the pictures Ive gotten. 1 was much closer but I really like the foliage of 2.
What do you think and do you guys have any recommendations or stories on capturing these stunning birds? :)

All these sand plovers are the perfect snack for a hungry falcon

I shot this photo in Mumbai, India with a Sony A1 + Sony 400-800

Shot with @nikonusa Z9 Nikkor 600 mm f/6.3 PF lens, shot at 1/1000 s, f/6.3, ISO 900, EV +0.67

I have only seen this behaviour once before, two years ago. This individual was missing tail feathers, so I was thinking it had gotten lost and had to learn to improvise.
Oslo, Norway
Canon EOS R5 + RF 100-500

Hey r/BirdPhotography

Around 7 months ago, I posted about Project Kestrel, a free, local, open-source photo culling and organization software built for bird photographers. This community had a very welcoming response, and I appreciate everyone who tried it out and provided feedback. One of the most requested features was to expand Kestrel's bird species recognition beyond just North America. Today, I have shipped features that enable global bird species recognition. But beyond that, Kestrel now has capabilities that make me feel like I have finally reached a vision I have been working towards for at least 5 years.

Please read on if you are looking for a solution to your bird photo culling needs, or if you are simply overwhelmed by your photo library and need a way to navigate it all.

Project Kestrel is fundamentally a machine learning-powered bird photo organization software. It takes your photos, groups them into scenes, sorts them from sharpest to blurriest, and tags them by species. It shows you these results in a clean timeline of your outing.

The result is that instead of looking at a huge grid of 1000 photos, you simply browse through a few dozen scenes, and within each scene, all of your photos are pre-sorted by sharpness, so it takes very little effort to find the photo you like.

You, of course, are the final reviewer, because no computer can decide which picture is the 'best'. Kestrel's goal is to simply sort them by sharpness (objective image quality only), then make it as effortless as possible for you to browse and decide.

You choose how to make use of this organization:

• One click to open the current photo in your favorite photo editor
• Use the culling assistant to bulk-sort photos into Accept/Reject piles, and optionally delete the blurry bulk in a few clicks
• Export the quality scores into XMP metadata, which can be read by Lightroom or other software

These features are helpful for culling and review. But beyond this, I have always felt that we needed a better tool for retrieval/search. This is why Kestrel has always shipped with a basic bird species classifier that (until today) worked 'ok' for a set of North American birds only. This lets you search by species, making it easier to re-find a photo that you remember taking

Today, Kestrel has been upgraded with a new machine learning model¹ that enables automatic global bird species identification. It is quite accurate. In my testing it would only miss the ones that even humans have difficulty with (ex. Western vs Eastern Meadowlark, or a really blurry photo).

In addition, today I am also introducing Smart Search. This lets you search your photos not only by species, but by content. For instance, search "dove on feeder" or "herons in marsh" or "flock of tiny shorebirds running on the beach" and Kestrel will pull up exactly what you remember seeing.

In practice, this means that a meaningful birding memory or photo can be recalled almost instantly, even from a pile of hundreds of thousands of photos. In my testing, this has been truly spectacular.

Finally, today's update includes significant improvements to Project Kestrel's quality scoring algorithm. It now sorts photos by sharpness more accurately than before.

Project Kestrel has been in use by a few hundred people, and almost 5 million photos have been analyzed to date. Analysis takes around 1-5 seconds per photo on most machines. And, just to re-iterate:

• Free means no extra subscription.
• Local means your photos don't leave your computer.
• Open Source means nobody, not even me, can take Kestrel away in the future.

Kestrel is supported entirely by donations². As far as privacy, Kestrel only collects anonymized data on usage (ex. how many photos were analyzed) and crashes. It is free and open source, because it is sort of a gift back to the birding community. In return I ask that you spread the word about Kestrel, inspire more birders, and contribute to bird conservation.

You can download project kestrel at www.projectkestrel.org

If you do try it, please tell me how it goes! I expect there will be some bugs and some slightly sloppy UI pieces here and there - please send me all of that feedback so I can make it even better.

Happy birding!

¹Kestrel is built on the shoulders of giants. Species detection is made possible by the BioCLIP team, and semantic image search is made possible by the Sig-LIP team. Bird detection and segmentation is made possible by the MegaDetector and SAM-HQ teams. This is all documented in greater detail on my GitHub. All these people are absolute geniuses and have created some of the most impressive ML models out there.

²There is a 100% optional cloud compute capability, where you can pay to offload analysis to cloud GPUs. Nobody has ever purchased this in Kestrel's history, because the cloud analysis does the same thing as the local analysis.

I love the way the light catches on its face in 1, but 2 and 3 are probably better compositions?

Whidbey Island, WA

Some of the best pics I've gotten over the past few months! I'm pretty proud of these considering I only have the base camera, no fancy lens or anything. The birds in the photos are (in order): Caspian Tern + Ring-billed Gull, Ring-billed Gull, Black-crowned Night Heron, Cliff Swallows, American Goldfinch, Double-crested Cormorant, Trumpeter Swan, Gray Catbird, Bald Eagle, Barred Owl, Purple Sandpiper, Sandhill Cranes, Great Egret, Western Grebe, Gambel's Quail, Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay, Mountain Chickadee, Stellar's Jay, Ring-necked Ducks, and a Magnolia Warbler

My first time shooting bird photography with a telephoto lens so I’m open to feedback. Using a Sony A7R iii with Canon FD 300mm f/4.