When I was shooting a medium format film camera prior to 2005, I tried many, many times to capture a lilac-breasted roller in flight over the course of several trips to Africa. With manual focus, manual exposure, and manual film advance -- and a top-end shutter speed of 1/400 -- it was an exercise in frustration. Even if I could get a bird in focus, the shutter just wasn't fast enough to take a sharp picture. Only when I went digital was I able to finally get pictures of this stunning bird in flight. Sometimes it's possible to get close to the perched birds, and then with patience you have to watch them through the viewfinder until they take off. For this image, I was using a 70-200mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me a focal length of 280mmm. My settings were 1/3200, f/8, and 1600 ISO.
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