Samsung Bird Photography: Zoom, Tracking and Settings

If you can get close enough to a fluttering subject – and use a fast enough shutter speed to freeze its movements – you can get some decent results.

With birds especially, it’s all about reach and tracking – they’re quick little things, and usually further away than they first appear. A 5x telephoto camera on a Galaxy Ultra can help here, filling a good portion of the frame with that finch in your garden while you’re safely holed up a few metres away. Any other Galaxy will demand patience and proximity.

Bird settings by situation

• Perched birds - use Pro mode and control shutter speed yourself.
• Moving birds - use Photo mode and shoot in bursts because sometimes you just won't be able to make changes fast enough!

These are just starting points, so play around and change things as required after a few frames.

If you're shooting in Pro mode, keep in mind that Samsung's Pro mode guide says ISO can't be set to Auto when you're manually adjusting shutter speed, so keep an eye on that exposure bar if you're standing around at a feeder waiting for birds and conditions change, and adjust ISO accordingly.

One UI 8.5 and newer adds another option with a setting in Camera Assistant that lets you specify a minimum shutter speed you want the camera to use in Photo mode (according to SamMobile, you can specify 1/1000, 1/500, 1/120 or 1/30 of a second). If you choose 1/1000, the camera will never use a shutter speed slower than that in Photo mode, so you can still take advantage of burst shooting and have exposure controlled automatically. Our Camera Assistant guide shows where the setting lives.

How far each Galaxy reaches

The table below shows a bird (15cm) as a percentage of the width of the image at different distances. Figures are calculated using 35mm-equivalent focal lengths given on GSMArena and assume photos taken in the default aspect ratio, so they should be treated as approximate.

That’s why most good phone bird photos are taken in places where the subjects aren’t shy, such as park ponds and feeders.

Cropping can be helpful, but each crop sacrifices some of the pixels a telephoto lens worked so hard to provide.

More reach isn’t the only difference between these lenses, and they differ more across the range than the model names suggest.

• All Galaxy S24 Ultra, S25 Ultra and S26 Ultra models feature a 10MP 3x telephoto lens and a 50MP 5x telephoto lens (the 10x zoom is a crop mode of the 5x telephoto lens).
• The Galaxy S21 Ultra, S22 Ultra and S23 Ultra models all have a dedicated 10x telephoto lens, still the most optical zoom available on a Galaxy phone, handy for those far-away waders!
• Galaxy S (base and Plus models), FE and the Z Fold7 have a 3x telephoto lens, fine for the bird that hops up a few metres away.
• The Galaxy S25 Edge, A series and Z Flip phones don’t have a telephoto lens, so 2x is a crop mode of the main camera and anything beyond that is digital zoom.
• Samsung refer to their zoom capabilities beyond 10x as Space Zoom. Essentially, the phone uses image processing to ‘guess’ and fill in additional detail, which is why those feathers look a bit ‘painty’ at higher magnifications!

Our telephoto lens guide takes a closer look at the three lenses, the 3x, 5x and 10x, and the 100x zoom guide covers when Space Zoom is worth using.

Tracking a moving bird

1. 1

   Check Tracking auto focus

   Tap the bird to focus on it, then tap again as it moves. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 and S26 support pages describe a feature in Camera settings > General called Tracking auto focus that keeps a selected subject in focus as it moves. However, on a Galaxy S25 Ultra running One UI 9, checked in November 2026, it’s greyed out (unavailable) in Photo mode.

2. 2

   Choose the zoom before you tap

   Tap on the bird after selecting 3x or 5x zoom. According to Samsung’s S26 phone manual, tracking doesn’t always work in certain situations, including zooming with the optical zoom, shooting a subject that’s backlit or is too small to track.

3. 3

   Set up the burst

   Swipe the shutter button down to the bottom of the screen and keep holding it down to take burst shots. Make sure Take burst shot is selected for the swipe function (on a Galaxy S25 Ultra running One UI 9, checked in November 2026, it’s in Camera Assistant; on older software versions Samsung’s Galaxy S25 support page says it’s in Camera settings). Release the button to stop taking burst shots. Our burst mode guide covers picking the best frame.

4. 4

   Brace before the bird moves

   At 5x and above, even the slightest wobble can send the bird out of frame and require reacquisition by the tracking software. Whenever possible, rest your elbows on something solid (knees, bench, fence, etc.).

5. 5

   Fire early and keep firing

   Begin the burst as it leans forward/crouches (typically just prior to taking off). End the burst when it has left and review the frames before its next visit.

But flight is the trickiest to photograph. The New York Institute of Photography suggests 1/1000s to start with for birds in flight, but smaller birds flap their wings very quickly so 1/2000s is a safer bet. Also, you’ll probably find it easier to keep a bird in frame against featureless sky with a 3x than a 5x - you can always crop later!

Fieldcraft and bird welfare

Try and remain in one place and let the birds come to you. Dress in subdued colours and try to avoid sudden movements.

If you have a garden feeder, put a branch in the ground next to it as birds love to land on branches before venturing on to feeders and you’ll get better pictures that way too.

Phone cameras have shorter reach, so be careful not to get too close to birds! Here are some of the suggestions for ethical bird photography from Audubon’s guide:

• Give birds time to relax. If your presence has caused a bird to fly away, you were too close.
• Learn to recognise signs of stress in birds (changes in behaviour or posture) and give birds extra room when you see these signs.
• Keep well away from nests and don’t rearrange vegetation (twigs, leaves, etc.) around them.
• Playing back birdsong to lure birds into view and using drones to get a bird’s-eye view are not okay.
• Think twice before broadcasting the whereabouts of rare or sensitive species online.

For other (larger) animals and mammals, where safe distances are regulated by the individual park, see our separate wildlife photography guide.

Why bird photos fail, and the fixes

• If you find focus is struggling with a soft bird and sharp background (especially branches), it’s probably focusing on the nearest sharp object, a twig, rather than the bird. Try tapping the bird itself to refocus or switch to manual focus in Pro mode (focusing on the perch the bird is about to land on works well).
• If you find you can’t focus on birds with the 5x camera at a bird feeder, you’re probably too close, as Samsung quotes a minimum focusing distance of 80cm for the S26 Ultra’s 5x, although GSMArena managed to focus at around 52cm. For reference, the S25 Ultra’s minimum focusing distance at 5x is 30cm.
• If wings look blurry at 1/500s, your shutter speed is probably optimised for perched birds. Increase it to 1/1000s or even 1/2000s when you expect birds to take off (you won’t get a chance to change it once they start!).
• If photos through windows look hazy, try placing the camera lens against the glass and switching off lights in the room you’re in to minimise reflections.
• If birds look silhouetted against bright skies, try tapping the bird, then using the exposure slider that appears to increase exposure, or wait for them to perch in front of trees instead of sky.
• If feathers look smudged or like brush strokes, you’re probably zooming in too much and noise reduction is kicking in. Get as close as you can and try to use no more than 10x zoom where possible and crop afterwards.

Editing bird photos

Crop to taste in the Gallery app (tap the Edit, or pencil, icon): most perched birds will work well in a portrait crop, and some birds, like herons and egrets, may merit an even taller crop. Try to crop so the bird is looking towards the bigger side of the frame. Resist the urge to crop too tightly, as there is a point at which images fall apart! After cropping, tap the sun-shaped icon to adjust brightness, contrast and saturation.

Snapseed’s free Selective tool is handy for increasing the brightness in just a small area, like a bird’s eye. The Details tool can add a hint of sharpness. Don’t overdo adjustments with either tool, because phone images become noisy/grainy quickly. Lightroom's masking needs a Premium subscription, as our Lightroom vs Snapseed comparison explains. Gallery’s Remaster option can help sharpen an otherwise-soft image (but beware, it can add feather detail that isn’t really there).