One of my goals in photographing birds in flight is to get their wings spread nicely. In addition, the ideal is to also get a nice tail feather spread. With this yellow-rumped cacique, I was able to get both. I can't say this was luck because it took me four days to get this shooting from a boat in the Pantanal region of Brazil. This was very difficult to capture because this bird species flies extremely fast. The issue isn't whether or not the autofocus can follow the bird and keep it sharp. It's a challenge just to keep it in the frame! So, the only option is to pre-focus on a place in front of the nest and wait for the action. It's easier to take the pictures as the birds are flying back to the nest because you can see them coming and prepare to shoot. Because the birds flew so fast with incredibly fast wing action, I set my shutter to 1/8000th of a second, and as you can see even the wing tips are sharp. The exposure mode was set to manual, the aperture was f/5.6 and the auto ISO setting produced 3200. I captured this with a 100-400mm lens. For the exposure, because the sky was so bright relative to the black wings, I overexposed two full f/stops to get detail in the dark portions of the bird.
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