Landing and taking off

The most dynamic graphic shapes of birds in flight usually occur at landing and lift-off. These are the times when the wings are outstretched dramatically or bent in some unique and interesting angle. In this shot, the snowy owl was alighting on a weathered fence post, and I pre-focused on the post and let the bird come into my depth of field zone. At 14 frames per second, I would typically get three and possibly four great shots with each one being different even though they were taken milliseconds apart. It was getting dark when I shot this, and my settings for this were 1/2500, f/5.6, and an astonishing 12,800 ISO! I didn't apply noise reducing software to this image yet, and you can see that even though there is some noise with the Canon 1Dx Mark II, the noise is quite acceptable considering how dark it was, how high the ISO had to be, and I was still able to maintain a fast enough shutter to freeze the beautiful wings.