Belted Kingfisher

15:22 Thursday, 12 December 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 56.71°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 54% Wind: 11.5mph
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Not an image I'd normally share, but it was interesting to me because it's the first time that I recall seeing a kingfisher back there in the swamp. They're smaller birds than the egrets and herons, so I'm less likely to notice them. This one's motion caught my attention. I had to pull out the binoculars to be sure. I figured by the time I got back with the camera it'd be gone, but it was still there!

Got a few frames before it decided to go after whatever it was hunting.

I've been shooting the birds out back with the E-M1X because it handles better with the 100-400mm zoom with the 1.4x teleconverter mounted than the OM-1, though if I was going out with the specific intent to shoot birds, I'd probably use the OM-1.

They both have bird identification as part of the autofocus algorithm, which is what makes these images possible at all. Even with in-body image stabilization, at 1120mm effective focal length, it's very hard to get one small auto-focus target on the bird, which is pretty much what you have to do at this distance. There are so many limbs and trees that can grab focus otherwise.

This is cropped to 3:2, so that's pretty much all the bird I get in the viewfinder, and it's dancing around pretty good as I'm trying to shoot. The bird ID will put a box around the bird and the af algorithm will confine its efforts to the bounding box. If there's enough subject, it'll try and focus on the head, or even the eye. In this case, I think I was lucky to get the bird at all.

Shutter speed was 1/500s (f9, ISO 320), so I'm relying on IBIS to reduce or eliminate motion blur. I'm happy with the result. It was a target of opportunity of a rare subject. Would I print it? Probably not, except to send to Mom.

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