Photo notebook

Mistakes from my attempts to capture birds in flight

I’ve been avoiding capturing birds in flight and my lack of practice cost me a chance to capture a Kārearea today.

While leaving Zealandia I heard the Kārearea overheard, and sure enough there it was. My attempts to capture it were thwarted by several mistakes in my technique:

  1. Shutter speed was not fast enough, I was using 1/320.
  2. Focus was initially set to single point instead of wide area or auto-area AF.
  3. Exposure mode was centre weighted instead of matrix.
  4. I should have taken a few moments and attempted to manual focus
  5. I also should have zoomed out a little to make tracking easier
The best shot I got of the Kārearea.
What most of the photos looked like.

I switched to Auto-Area AF and continued to get mixed results, but certainly better. Some were out of focus, a lot would have benefited from a higher shutter speed had I thought to do that.