Lightning fast

One of the coolest shots we were able to take in the Pantanal was kingfishers diving for fish. The only way to capture these super fast birds was to bait them, and we would toss a fish into the river 20 or 30 feet from our boat. The birds would immediately swoop down, hit the water, spear the fish with their beak, and take off all in a few milliseconds. The 14 frames per second capability of my Canon 1Dx Mark II was able to catch every nuance of the water spray and the spread of the wings. Because this camera handles noise so well at high ISO settings, I used shutter speeds faster than I would otherwise to insure that each droplet and each wing tip feather was sharp. My settings for this picture were 1/5000, f/8, 4000 ISO. It took several attempts, though, to get great shots only because with a telephoto lens, the birds are in and out of the frame so fast that sometimes my reaction time was too slow. I used a 100-400mm lens for this image set at 349mm. This is a ringed kingfisher, one of five species we photographed.