One of the most challenging types of pictures in nature photography to take is when a bird flies directly at the camera. The camera-subject distance changes every millisecond. In the past, autofocus systems couldn't keep up. Even now, with fast flying small birds, it's almost impossible to capture sharp pictures. Pre-focusing at a closer distance and letting the bird fly into the 'focus zone' gives a photographer the best chance of getting a sharp action shot. In this case,I focused on the bird. The black-collared hawk is a relatively slow flying large bird, and 1) there is a large area for the AF mechanism to lock onto, plus 2) the AF mechanism in most of the modern cameras is fast enough to follow focus. I took this from a boat with a 100-400mm Canon zoom at 158mm, and the settings were 1/3200, f/5.6, and 800 ISO. Notice the small fish in the hawk's talons. This was taken in the Pantanal region of Brazil.
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