Flight of the Long-tailed Duck

© Greg Downing Photography all rights reserved.

Long-tailed Duck, Barnegat Light, New Jersey

My absence from this forum and others must be obvious, and for that I apologize. I love to just sit in front of my computer and comment on the many wonderful images posted here and in the other forums, but time has not allowed me to do it much this past week or so. I am not complaining, just apologizing. There is much going on behind the scenes here and there are a few things in the works that I am sure everyone will be pleased with when implemented. Please be patient and pardon our dust as we build.

While sitting here working, I thought I would grab an image from my files, already prepared for posting. It has been seen before but it’s another favorite of mine. It was taken in February of this year at Barnegat Light.

Shooting flight with the 2x can often be frustrating and there are a few tricks to getting AF to lock on the bird. What I did here was to follow the bird’s flight pattern trying to read where he was going to land, based on wing position and flight speed. I then manually focused on the water in that general area and quickly lifted the camera until the bird was seen in the frame. When the bird was in the desired position I engaged autofocus and bang!

EOS 1D, EF 600/4L IS, manual exposure, 1/640 @ F11, ISO 250