Finally come home with keepers, not soft shots.

Dear Friends,

You get home from a morning out, put the card in the computer, and start clicking through.

Soft. Soft again. An empty branch where the bird had been a second earlier. The one frame where something actually happened is blurred.

I know that feeling. It's not lack of talent. It's a camera that was never set up for birds.

My name is Tim Laman. I photograph birds for National Geographic, where I've shot 25 feature stories, and in 2016 I was named Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

But I didn't start out anything like that. For years I came home with a whole card of soft photos, and I had no idea what I was doing wrong.

At first I thought my gear was the problem.

So I bought a new camera, but barely anything changed.

Then the problem had to be me. Maybe photography was just too hard for me.

It took me years to realize that neither of those things was true.

The real problem was that I was using the wrong technique and the wrong settings for birds. Nobody had ever given me something simple that worked every time.

In your manual, you have a lot of information. On YouTube, you can watch a lot of information. In books, you can read a lot of information.

But none of them show you how actually to use your camera in real situations with birds.

That's why I put together my complete program:

Birds, Camera,Action

In it, I've boiled down everything I've learned in nearly 30 years shooting for National Geographic, Netflix, and the BBC.

And to make it as easy as possible to follow and apply, I take you through specific bird situations and show you step by step how I set up my camera for each one.

It's like following a Google Maps route with turn-by-turn directions. You can relax, and you don't have to make the map yourself.

If you still don't believe that YOU can learn to use this simple framework, let me tell you a little story.

When my son Russell was about seven, I took him out on a little photography adventure for a few days. I handed him my old Canon 20D with a 100 to 300mm kit lens. Then I set the camera up for him with five settings (you'll get the same five in the first lesson).

After that, I gave him three instructions. Get the bird in the frame. Push this button on the back with your thumb to focus. When it looks sharp, push this other one on the front.

He had no idea what a shutter speed was, or an aperture, or an ISO. He didn't need to know.

He went out and took thousands of pictures over those few days, and he had a blast. He got close enough to a black vulture that one of his frames needed no cropping at all. He even came back with a few flight shots of white pelicans.

My whole point is that you don't need to understand everything to go out and get beautiful photos of birds. Just like with my son Russell, this is exactly how we start off in Birds, Camera, Action.

From there, we build on that with specific bird situations, so you can walk into almost any scene with a bird and get the shot you had in your head.

See you inside the program,

Tim Laman PhD, Harvard University
National Geographic photographer