Learn to tell apart the most common garden bird calls and discover what they are actually saying.

Some of the best bird photographs are taken from indoors, through a window, with a cup of tea within reach. It sounds too easy, but window photography is a genuine technique used by professionals who want to avoid disturbing their subjects. Birds behave more naturally when they cannot see or hear a photographer, and your house makes an excellent hide. The trick is knowing how to work around the glass.

The most common mistake beginners make is shooting through a dirty window and then wondering why every image looks soft. Clean the glass thoroughly, inside and out, and do it before every session if you can. Fingerprints, dust, and dried rain spots all soften the image and create haze, especially when the sun is low and shining directly towards you.

Positioning and Light

Where you stand matters as much as what you shoot with. Try to position yourself so the window is in shadow, or at least not directly facing bright sunlight, because backlight through glass produces flare and washed-out contrast. A north-facing window is often ideal because the light is soft and consistent throughout the day. If you must shoot towards the sun, press your lens hood right up against the glass to block stray light.

Get as close to the window as possible. Every centimetre between your lens and the glass increases the chance of reflections, and reflections are the enemy. Wearing dark clothing helps, and turning off lights in the room behind you is essential. At night or on dull days, a piece of black card taped around the lens can shield the glass from interior reflections entirely.

For focal length, something in the region of 200 to 400mm gives you a comfortable working distance from the feeder. A zoom lens is more flexible than a prime because birds will land at different distances, and you cannot easily move to reposition when you are stuck behind a window frame. Aperture-wise, try f/5.6 to f/8 to give yourself a bit of depth of field, since focusing through glass is less precise than focusing in open air.

Focusing and Patience

Autofocus can struggle through glass, particularly if the window is not perfectly clean or if there is any haze. Switch to single-point autofocus and aim at the bird's eye, which is the part that must be sharp. If autofocus hunts endlessly, switch to manual focus and use live view to fine-tune. Burst mode is useful for capturing the moment a bird lands or takes off, but be prepared to delete a lot of frames.

Set up a perch near the window, ideally a branch with a bit of character, and place your feeder just behind it. This encourages birds to land on the branch before moving to the food, giving you a natural-looking shot rather than a photo of a bird on a plastic feeder. Clean the perch occasionally and vary the plants around it so your images do not all look identical.

Finally, accept that window photography has limits. You will occasionally get soft images, and the glass will sometimes win. But the trade-off is a steady stream of intimate, undisturbed bird portraits taken from the comfort of your own home, which is a very good deal indeed.