Black-collared hawk in flight

One of my favorite birds in flight shots from my various trips to the Pantanal region of Brazil is this black-collared hawk who had just grabbed a fish and was flying directly toward my camera. I took this with a 100-500mm telephoto, and that meant depth of field was shallow. Every millisecond the bird is in motion, the focus changes. It's a tribute to the brilliant engineers who design our modern cameras that are able to hold focus on such a fast-moving subject. My settings were 1/3200, f/5.6, and 800 ISO. In retrospect, I should have closed the lens down to f/11 to add depth to the focus zone. Although the main attraction for me in the Pantanal are the jaguars, there are so many exotic birds that virtually all day long there are photo ops. My next trip to this amazing place is Dec. 1, 2025.