Speaker Session 3:00pm
Col Roberts
Birding
Discover the secrets to better bird photography with Col Roberts. Learn how to find birds, anticipate behaviour, work with light and backgrounds, choose the right gear, and capture more compelling wildlife images in the field.
Join award-winning wildlife photographer Col Roberts as he shares practical techniques for creating stronger and more engaging bird photographs. Drawing on years of experience photographing birds in the field, Col will explore how understanding bird behaviour, habitat, lighting, and composition can dramatically improve your success rate and image quality.
This session will cover finding and photographing target species, recognising and anticipating bird behaviour, working with natural light, selecting clean and complementary backgrounds, and choosing the right equipment for different situations. Col will also discuss the advantages of lightweight field setups, using zoom lenses effectively, capturing action and flight shots in challenging conditions, and why photographers shouldn’t be afraid to push ISO settings when needed.
Whether you’re interested in intimate bird portraits, behavioural storytelling, water reflections, or making the most of modern high-resolution cameras through smart cropping techniques, this session will provide practical advice and field-tested insights to help elevate your bird photography.
Biography
Col Roberts is recognised as one of the world’s leading bird photographers and has published 7 highly regarded coffee table books, including ‘Finches of Australia’ and ‘Gouldian – The World’s Most Beautiful Finch’. He was the first person to photograph and publish all of Australia’s finch species and subspecies.
He loves nothing better than studying satellite images, followed up by deploying a drone, and then hiking into prospective remote waterholes where no other photographer has ventured before. Many of his images record behaviour that has been unknown beforehand, let alone captured on a camera. This has only come about by his intimate knowledge of various target bird species and then being prepared to spend years in the field, in often oppressive conditions to capture ‘hard to get images’.
When not exploring his home patch in the Kimberley he likes to travel to remote locations in Africa and South America to photograph their beautiful birds.