CHICAGO - Claire Dassy is serious about getting close to her birds.

Her garage, just up the hill from the Fox River in Algonquin, Ill., is lined with six galvanized tubs, garbage-can size, each one filled with 50-pound sacks of seed - a feast for the flocks. Kitchen cupboards are stacked with Tupperware and a larder is stuffed with thistle, sunflower, and safflower. Ten jars of grape jelly await oriole season, when the songbirds come back for summer. She buys suet by the case.

"Backyard bird photography begins with feeding," says Dassy, a home-health nurse when not behind the lens of her Canon digital SLR camera. She has five feeders on a deck that's barely big enough for a round-topped table (for the humans of the house).

Then there's Dassy's attempt to avoid ruffling feathers. She dresses, she says, "like a tree," meaning she sticks to dark greens and browns.

And she's near saintly when it comes to patience. "I've developed quite a way of being very quiet."

So quiet, in fact, she has had a rose-breasted grosbeak sit down to lunch with her. (Well, it eyed her PB&J from just inches away.)

Even in winter, when she mostly "shoots through dirty glass" (that being her sliding door), she manages to use her back-deck roost as the site for bird photos so up-close and personal you can practically feel the pounding of the bird's heart.

"One of the best compliments I've ever gotten," she says, "is when someone recognizes something as a Claire Dassy shot - not because it's technically perfect, but because it shows the essence of the bird."

Indeed, says Dassy, who grew up on City Island in the Bronx, where her father rigged up a garbage-can lid on a pole to feed the birds outside their apartment window, the No. 1 truth of bird photography is: Know thy birds.

Sure, the lens and shutter speed make a difference, but not nearly so much as understanding bird behavior, says Dassy.

"Know what time of day they feed," she says. "Know how they respond to weather conditions. Know the time of year they appear. Know their personalities."

The biggest challenges with birds are one, they're skittish, and two, they don't sit still for long, says Garth McElroy, a bird photographer in Maine who also finds the backyard a great place to get fabulous bird pictures because, well, you can control what goes on in your own little nature center.

He likens the backyard to a personal studio where "eye-catching, close-up bird photography is possible without extravagant equipment."

The golden rule of bird photography, he says, is to make sure the sun is at your back. "That gives you the most light, so every feather and every crease of the bird is lit up," says McElroy, whose work can be found in plenty of birding magazines, even the field guide of the American Museum of Natural History, published last year.

His corollary to the sunlight rule: "Once your shadow is shorter than you are tall, it's time to come in," McElroy says, explaining that in winter, you'll have good light till about noon, but come late spring and summer, you'll need to put away the lens by 9 in the morning, when the light grows too harsh.

Most bird photographers prefer morning to evening light, simply because birds are busier at dawn, when the long night's hunger has them flitting about for seed.

One nifty trick of McElroy's is that when he is out shooting birds, he takes down all but one of his backyard feeders.

"This creates a waiting line for the feeder and forces birds to perch and wait," he says.

And for those who want to frame the birds, that up-close platform holds the key to what's soulful about birding, framed or otherwise.

"I think they just show us something about life," says Dassy, unabashed in her love for birds, "the way they spend time looking for just the right seed, the way they build their nests."

If she could, she would spend her whole day perched on her deck, waiting for her little friends to teach her all they know - and hop before her lens.

Pointers on Snapping Birds

Here are tips from backyard bird photographers: Point-and-shoot cameras make it challenging to get a great bird photo. Unless your feeder is right outside your window, point-and-shoots can't zoom in the way you need.

You'll need a shutter speed of at least 1/125th of a second. Ideally, you'll use 1/500th of a second to 1/1000th.

You'll want a lens in the 200- to 300-millimeter range, if you have an interchangeable-lens camera (SLR).

A tripod is a good idea, so you can keep the camera steady.

If you prefocus on your perch (the feeder, a tree branch, etc.), it will lessen the time it takes to focus once the bird lands.

Sitting low in a lawn chair makes you less of a red flag to the birds - and because you might be out there for awhile anyway, you might as well get comfy.