Quote:
Originally Posted by TripleBlack
Brilliant! 
It's hard to understand how difficult it is to capture images of birds in flight until you've tried it. I've experimented with quite a few photographic disciplines and it's easier to capture a nice image of the Eagle Nebula than an eagle in flight. |
The single biggest thing is to understand what you're looking at. In other words, behavior. For example the shot of the two adults with locked talons was the resident male defending his nest. The female was incubating and the male was nearby on a branch. When the intruder came into the area I knew the male was most likely going to chase him off. So I stayed on the intruder just in case. My hunch was right. The resident bird started having a fit and gave chase.
You never know *quite* where contact is gonna happen unfortunately so you're swinging your camera around and tripping on the tripod like an idot.
The bird flying in with the seaweed I picked up when he was just a spec in the sky. I kept manually bumping focus until he got in close enough to take the pics then I let autofocus take over. I knew where he was going; the nest.
The Hawk shot was 'easy' per say he was just sitting there. I took my boilerplate shots then started dropping my shutter and closing down my aperture. A few of the shot's didn't turn out as I was down to 1/500th second at f/11. But a few did.