Frog for breakfast?
This shot was taken in January, 2006, in South Africa. I was actually there with some entomologist friends photographing dragonflies, but at one spot we stopped there was a pair of African Pygmy Kingfishers flying back and forth from a nest hole on the river bank. I saw that one of the birds occasionally stopped on a nearby small branch to scope out the scene before carrying a meal into its hole to feed the young. We positioned our vehicle as close as we could to this perch and while the others went out to photograph dragonflies I sat in the vehicle and was able to get a number of shots of the beautiful little kingfisher with a variety of prey it had captured. This was shot horizontal and I've cropped it vertically. We could get no closer to the perch because of a steep bank (the limb was well out over the water). Anyway, some of the images worked out pretty well. It is a lovely bird to see. If I had bumped the ISO to 800, I could have gotten a little more shutter speed, or if I'd used fill flash it would have been a little better as well, but overall I like the image. The bird stayed busy and brought in grasshoppers, dragonflies, moths, and several frogs and tadpoles. Yummy.
Canon EOS 1D Mark II
EF 500mm F/4 L IS with 2X TC
1/100 sec @ f/8
400 ISO
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