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by duncang on Mon Aug 30, 2021 5:29 pm
duncang
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Joined: 30 Aug 2021
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After finally managing to capture some great full frame images of swallows in flight I put together a video to show how I managed to do it.  Even with a great location, ideal weather, co-operative birds and some of the best equipment it still took 4 days and 16,000 images.  16,000 images sounds like a lot but in reality that was about 9 minutes of shutter down time over the 4 days.

The majority of images were shot at 400mm with a 400mm zoom lens, there are a few taken at 840mm with a teleconverter just to show it could be done.   I found a zoom with a short throw to be ideal as I could acquire focus at around 300mm and then zoom in to 400mm with one finger for the capturing the images. I could only really keep the bird in the frame for at most 2 or 3 seconds and for half that time they were a bit too far to fill the frame for good detailed images.

I also found I had to use a very high shutter speed to avoid motion blur when they are close up. 1/8000s seemed to largely eliminate motion blur but 1/3200s most images had slight signs of motion blur.  I guess when the subject is that close any small movement is moving across many more pixels than the same movement at a distance so it makes sense to have to do that.  

Of course that means shooting at high iso but as long as you fill the frame the noise at iso6400 does not show up in the final images.  For the most part the images are cropped only slightly from the original to give an aspect ratio of 16:9.  The original images are best viewed on a 4K or 5K display - there is a link in the video comments to the images.
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And that background is not blue sky, it is rippled water but the bokeh is that good when focussing on close up subjects you would be forgiven for thinking it might be the sky.

 

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