Gallery: Nesting Great Blue Herons

From the Spring 2020 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

The moment, the light, the angle— everything was just right to capture this image of a Great Blue Heron and nestling at a rookery in Florida. “A great bird photograph doesn’t happen by accident,” says Gerrit Vyn, wildlife photographer and Conservation Media producer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Vyn shares some of his secrets to the calculus he puts into every photo—from the technical settings and lens choices on the camera to the lighting, framing, and editing to get the perfect image— in his guide Photography: Birds, published in April 2020 by Mountaineers Books.