When you photograph birds in flight -- perhaps the hardest type of nature photography -- you need to activate all the focus points the camera has to offer. Birds fly very fast, and it's a challenge just to keep them in the center of the frame. If the moment you snap the shutter they are outside the center, you need the peripheral focal points to catch their movement and identify the bird as the subject. If you have only the center point or points selected, it's too easy for the autofocus mechanism to lose the bird as you're trying to follow it and then the camera tries to focus on the sky -- which is impossible unless there are defined clouds in the background. In a picture like this taken on one of my Namibia photo tours, had the camera lost focus and tried to lock onto the sky, the lens would have gone haywire -- meaning it would continually focus back and forth and the shot would have been lost. Only because I was using all of the focus points in the camera was I able to capture this African white pelican in sharp focus.
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