Hi, I'm Edward! I love birding, photography and traveling.

I have been birding in California since 2019. I've been able to partner with other local birders to explore birding hotspots in the United States.

Birder by Accident

I started birding by accident. I was not aware birding was a thing until the day I needed to prepare for my trip to Houston, Texas for a special event. At the time I was debating whether I should buy a new camera for my trip or just stick to my iPhone. I did not know anything about cameras, shutter speed, aperture or ISO; it was all foreign to me.

My co-worker suggested I play with his DSLR camera before I bought one since cameras are not cheap. So I accepted his offer and began to use his camera in my spare time. So here was the problem, I could not just walk to a complete stranger to practice taking pictures and I definitely felt awkward walking around town or my neighborhood with a camera taking random photos.

My first bird photo

So I remember having my camera during lunch at work in the middle of nowhere in the Central Valley. I had nothing around me other than a lot of grape vines for miles. So I pulled out the camera and began to play with the settings but had nothing to shoot at. I heard a lot of little sparrows outside my car that kept jumping up around looking for food. So I decided to test the settings on my camera but the darn birds wouldn’t stand still. What began as just playing around with the camera settings ended up becoming a challenging game of trying to get a sharp photo of these little birds. Finally, lunch ended and I had to get back to work. No luck on getting that sharp photo but I guess I learned that cameras had a lot more settings than I thought.

On my next break, I noticed another group of birds and thought I could give the camera another try. Now that I was a bit more familiar with the camera I was able to get a little better photos. Not sharp at all but at least I was able to take the photo a little faster. But shortly I had to get back to work.

Instagram

Later on that night, scrolling through my Instagram, I realized my friend Jorge's profile had a lot of awesome photos. Then I began to wonder if he took those photos with a camera or just his phone. Scrolling through his pics I came across his DSLR camera.

“He owns a camera!”, I got excited.

Maybe he might be able to suggest what would be best for my trip to Houston. Or even give me some pointers on using a DSLR camera. So I gave him a call to ask him about his photos and camera but he said most of his photos were taken on his iPhone. He explained he owned a DSLR camera but he didn’t really know how to use it very well but would love to learn. We had a great conversation regarding the subject. I could tell he was just as excited as I was about learning how to use a camera. We talked about getting together and going out to shoot one day, maybe downtown or self portraits. This got me exited and motivated me to buy my own Canon camera.

The Bird Challenge

When I got back from my Houston trip I was 100% convinced I made the right choice. I was soo glad I bought my camera, loved it! Talking with Jorge he was also using his DSLR more but he was going through the same issues I was at first. He felt a little weird taking pictures, there was just no subject to practice on. We needed a way to be more regular on shooting our camera in order to eventually get good at it.

Then the idea came to me, what if we take photos of birds! There's birds everywhere. Lets see who can take more photos of different species of birds. At first the idea sounded a little silly, but I tried to reason with Jorge.

"Birds are always moving around, sometimes in poor lighting conditions. It's gonna help us play around more with our settings to get the right exposure and shutter speed." I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. "This will be fun.", I assured in a playful tone.

The next day I started to send Jorge a photo or two of the birds I would capture during the day. Eventually, he began to send me some too.

Netflix and eBird

Coming soon.

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