Making of: Sanderling (Calidris alba) flight

[Juan Aragonés]

This is one of my favorite images and one of the first flights that I made with the 300VR after two years using the slow 80-400VR. Wow, what an improvement! :eek:
The original capture is a jpeg because I didn´t want to use RAW due to file size and additional processing time (BTW, one of the most stupid things I have ever made!:(). Now I use RAW 100% of the times. This species is widely spread so I think it is not neccesary to give additional information about how fast this little guys are. It is almost impossible to get a sharp image, at close distance, of a bird coming on direct flight towards the photographer, but it is factible to catch them when they are flying parallelly to the photographer while panning with the camera. It is very important to observe the behaviour of the subjects that we want to photograph because the probabilities of a good result increases noticeably. After some attempts to catch one of this “featherd bullets” I observed that they were flying with a very repetitive pattern and I just needed to select a pre-focused distance and wait for the birds, panning and got the image. When they are banking or in the middle of a turn, their speed in relation to the photographer reach its minimun value and this is the best moment to catch them. If you are panning in the same direction of the bird flight the relative speed decreased more.

That day on the beach I returned to home with a good amount of tack sharp images of sanderlings in flight. The best way to get a good image of an animal is to observe it and to learn about their habits, movements and behavior.

Nikon D2X AFS Nikkor 300VR handheld HSC mode (6Mp at 8fps), 1/3000s f5,6 ISO 320, aperture priority, single AF sensor activated (central), continuos AF, matrix metering, with -1EV (matrix metering in Nikon is fantastic, I use it about 100% of the times. It works fine in Manual exposure mode withe exposure compensation)

Processing: Cropping for composition, selective noise reduction to the BG (and a touch of gaussian blur), selective sharpenning on the bird, levels and saturation, sRGB color space, save for web

[Gyorgy Szimuly]

Very nice result Juan. Love the wingpose.
I feel it a bit oversharpened.

Szimi

[Judy Lynn Malloch]

Very beautiful flight pose Juan and a great BG. Congratulations on your new lens and it's great results.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great wing position and exposure control. It looks a bit oversharpened on my monitor and I might try to remove the sheen on beak and legs.

[Gus Cobos]

Great capture Juan,
I like the details and clarity of your subject with sharp details...:cool:

[Doug Brown]

Thanks for the tips on trying to photograph speeding bullets Juan! Impressive image! As stated above, it looks a little oversharpened. But it's still a nice photo of a challenging subject.