You’ve seen the shot. A tiny, vibrant Indigo Bunting looks like it’s about to collide with a mountain peak, or maybe a Painted Bunting appears to be the size of a Cessna, soaring over a miniature forest. It’s jarring. It’s weird. Honestly, it’s usually an accident, but when it’s intentional, forced perspective flying buntings become some of the most debated images in the birding community. People get heated about this stuff. Is it art? Is it deceptive? Or is it just a byproduct of how telephoto lenses compress space until reality looks like a collage?
Photography is basically lying to tell the truth. When we talk about forced perspective, we’re talking about a visual trick that uses scale and distance to make objects appear larger, smaller, closer, or farther away than they actually are. In the world of avian photography, specifically with the Passerina genus—those jewel-toned buntings we all obsess over—this usually happens because of "lens compression."
Lenses don't actually compress space. That’s a myth. What's happening is that you're standing 50 feet away with a 600mm prime lens. Because you're so far from the bird and even further from the background, the relative distance between the bunting and that distant treeline seems to vanish. The bird looks like it’s "flying" right against a texture it hasn’t actually reached yet.
The Optical Illusion of the "Giant" Bunting
Most people think forced perspective requires a complex movie set or a Lord of the Rings filming budget. It doesn't. For birders, it’s often about the "foreground bokeh" or "foreground elements" that catch us off guard. If a Lazuli Bunting flies past a blade of grass that is inches from your lens while the bird is thirty feet away, that grass becomes a giant, blurry green monolith. Suddenly, the bird looks like it's navigating a forest of seaweed.
It’s kind of funny how often this happens by mistake. You’re tracking a bird in flight, the autofocus locks on, and bam—the perspective shifts because of a stray branch in the lower third of the frame.
Professional wildlife photographers like Audrey Whitlock or Joel Sartore often discuss the ethics of the "frame." If you use forced perspective to make a bunting look like it’s interacting with an environment it isn't actually in, are you documenting nature or creating a composite? The line is thin. Real thin. Most enthusiasts just want a cool shot for Instagram, but the purists? They'll sniff out an unnatural perspective shift in seconds. They know a bunting's wingspan is roughly 8 to 9 inches. If that bunting looks wider than the oak tree behind it, your perspective is forced.
Why Buntings Are the Perfect (and Hardest) Subjects
Buntings are erratic. They don't fly in straight lines like a hawk or a waterfowl species. They flit. They zip. They are basically feathered pinballs. This makes capturing forced perspective flying buntings incredibly difficult because you can’t easily "set up" the shot. You have to be where the light is, but you also have to calculate your depth of field on the fly.
If you’re shooting at $f/4$ to get that creamy background, your plane of focus is razor-thin. If the bird moves two inches toward you, it’s a blur. To get a successful forced perspective shot where both the bunting and the "secondary" object (like a distant building or a nearby flower) look intentionally placed, you almost always need to stop down to $f/8$ or $f/11$. But then you lose your shutter speed. It's a massive trade-off.
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You've probably noticed that Painted Buntings are the "holy grail" for this. Their colors—red, blue, green, yellow—are so saturated they almost look like they were Photoshopped into the sky even when the photo is 100% "real." When you add a perspective trick into the mix, it looks like a neon sign flying through the woods.
Common Gear Misunderstandings
People think they need a macro lens for this. Nope.
- You actually need a long telephoto (400mm+).
- You need a fast sensor that can handle high ISO.
- You need a lot of patience. Like, "sitting in a bush for four hours" patience.
The physics of it is simple. The further you are from your subject, the more the background "pulls in." If you want a bunting to look like it’s flying over a mountain range, you don't go to the mountain. You stay miles away and zoom in until the mountain fills the frame behind the bird. It’s the same technique used in those famous "giant moon" photos where a hiker looks like they’re walking on the lunar surface.
The Ethics of "The Setup"
Let's get real for a second. A lot of those "perfect" forced perspective shots are staged. Photographers use bird feeders or specific perches to lure the bunting into a pre-calculated "kill zone" where the background is perfectly aligned.
Is this okay?
The National Audubon Society has pretty strict guidelines on this. If you’re altering the bird’s behavior for a "cool" shot, you’re drifting into unethical territory. Forced perspective is fine, but baiting a bunting into a specific flight path just to make it look like it's "attacking" a toy car or "landing" on a person’s finger (a classic forced perspective trope) is generally frowned upon.
It's better to find natural convergences. Look for places where the topography allows you to shoot "down" on a bird from a ridge while the valley floor is miles below. That’s how you get that epic, soaring-over-the-world look without faking a single thing.
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Technical Hurdles You'll Actually Face
Atmospheric haze is the enemy here. Since forced perspective relies on long distances, the air between you and the background often gets "dirty." Heat shimmer, dust, and humidity can turn a sharp mountain backdrop into a mushy gray mess.
You’ll also struggle with "subject isolation." Usually, in bird photography, we want the bird to pop. We want the background to disappear into a soft, blurry wash. But forced perspective requires the background to have enough detail to be recognizable. If the mountain is just a gray blob, the "flying over the mountain" effect is lost. You're stuck in a weird middle ground where you need detail in the distance but sharpness on a tiny, fast-moving target. It's frustrating. It'll make you want to throw your camera in a lake.
How to Pull It Off Without Looking Like a Beginner
If you want to try this, start with a "near-far" composition. Find a static object—maybe an old rustic fence post or a specific wildflower. Position yourself so the flower is in the bottom corner of your frame, but keep it about 5 to 10 feet away. Then, wait for a bunting to land on a perch or fly through a corridor about 30 feet behind that flower.
If you time it right, the bunting will look like it’s tiny and "perched" on the edge of the flower petals, even though they are yards apart.
- Use a high shutter speed (at least 1/2000th).
- Turn off "Subject Detection" if it keeps jumping to the foreground object.
- Use manual focus override if your lens supports it.
Actually, the manual focus part is huge. Most modern mirrorless cameras (the Sony A1 or the Canon R3) are geniuses at finding eyes, but they get confused when you're intentionally trying to create a multi-layered perspective shot. Sometimes you have to take the "brain" out of the camera and do it yourself.
What Most People Get Wrong
The biggest mistake? Thinking that more zoom equals better perspective. It doesn't.
Perspective is entirely a function of your position. If you don't move your feet, zooming in and out doesn't change the relationship between the bunting and the trees behind it; it just crops the image. To change the perspective, you have to physically move. You have to get lower, higher, or further back.
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I've seen so many people try to get these shots by standing right under a tree. All you get there is a "worm's eye view," which makes the bird look like a dark silhouette against a bright sky. That’s not forced perspective; that’s just a bad exposure.
To make it work, you need a "compression corridor." You need a clear line of sight that spans at least 100 yards of depth. Think about a long forest trail or a coastal cliffside. That’s where the magic happens.
Actionable Steps for Your Next Outing
Stop looking for the bird first. That sounds counterintuitive, I know. But if you want a specific perspective, you have to find the "stage" first. Find a background that has scale—a distant barn, a mountain range, or even a specific cloud formation.
Once you have your stage, figure out where the buntings are moving. Are they hitting a specific patch of thistle? Are they flying from a nesting site to a water source?
- Set your aperture to f/8. You need that extra bit of depth.
- Find your "anchor" object. This is the thing that provides the scale (the "forced" part of the perspective).
- Wait. Honestly, just wait.
- Burst mode is your friend. Since you’re dealing with high-speed flight and tricky alignments, you might take 500 shots to get one where the bird’s wing isn't overlapping the background awkwardly.
Don't over-edit the result. One of the tell-tale signs of a fake forced perspective shot is when the lighting on the bird doesn't match the lighting on the background. If the bunting is backlit but the mountain behind it is front-lit, the human brain knows something is "off." It looks like a bad green-screen job from a 1970s sci-fi movie.
Check your histograms. Ensure the shadows on the bird are consistent with the shadows in the landscape. If you do that, you’ll have an image that stops people in their tracks because it looks like a glitch in the matrix—but it’s just good physics.
Go out to a local nature preserve this weekend. Look for the "layers" in the landscape before you even take the lens cap off. Once you start seeing the world in layers of depth rather than just "subject and background," your photography changes forever. You stop taking pictures of birds and start taking pictures of the space they inhabit. That's the real secret to mastering forced perspective.