Birds flying right at the camera at close range are extremely challenging in terms of maintaining sharp focus. The larger the bird is, the better. Birds with large wing spans fly slower than small birds. I captured this black-collared hawk in the Pantanal region of Brazil with a 100-400mm on a 1Dx Mark II body at 14 frames per second. The autofocus tracking is extremely good on this camera, and the fast shooting rate allows me to capture every nuance of the flight. I used a super fast shutter to freeze even the tips of the wing feathers because, in my opinion, blur would have degraded the image. The magic about birds in flight is the detail. My settings for this were 1/3200, f/5.6, 800 ISO, and I hand held the camera in a boat. If you look closely at the bird's talons, you can see he has a fish.
2 Comments
Jan 13, 2017, 7:17:58 AM
Jim - Bob, I used to do that, too -- have my shutter too slow. Always disappointed. The fast shutter is the key. For this picture, believe it or not, my focal length was 158mm because our boat was so close to the hawk. The photo is cropped somewhat, though, but I find that if I'm too tight, it's hard to hold focus. I've used the 1.4x teleconverter with this lens with good results, but not with this picture.
Jan 13, 2017, 12:01:10 AM
Bob Vestal - Always helpful, Jim, to know your settings. Thank you. I have a tendency to shoot too slow in order to keep ISO low, and then I am disappointed in the result. Was your focal length 400 mm for this shot? I gather that you like using this lens. Have you much experience with using 1.4x teleconverter with the 100-400 mm lens?