Yesterday my photo tour group and I spent the entire day photographing a spectacular bird colony at Cape St. Mary's here in Newfoundland. There are approximately 50,000 birds here, mostly northern gannets. It was astonishing. The air was thick with birds -- and never a mid-air collision! We all got great pictures of them in flight. I used my standard settings for birds in motion: Manual exposure mode, 1/3200 shutter speed to freeze their wings, f/11 for a decent amount of depth of field, and auto ISO so the exposures will be correct. I used two lenses depending on how close the birds were -- a 100-400mm and a 500mm sometimes with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter. I've included two pictures here, one of which is to show you a section of the rock the birds use to nest on. The closeup of the gannet returning to its mate was taken with a 400mm focal length. I used my Canon 1Dx Mark II for all the shots with the 14 frames per second setting.
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