Bird in Flight ... Camera at Full Throttle

As part of our nature workshop we went to St.Bees Head today to take pictures of the sea birds on the cliffs and in flight. The weather was bright and sunny though it was blowing a fairly stiff breeze on the top of the cliffs and the tripods were vibrating in the wind.

It was to be my first successful attempt at getting reasonably sharp pictures of birds in flight ( or BIFs as they are known in the birding community ). I had purposely bought a Canon 7D a year or so ago with this sort of thing in mind because of its quick autofocus and high continuous shooting speed. Initially I was using my old 100-400mm lens with a 2x converter but eventually realised that the 7D was locking me out of servo mode with this lens combination on. I tried it with a 1.4X converter with the same problem of ending up in manual focus mode. I found this strange as I had never encountered this problem with my old Canon 5D though its autofocus was very slow and haphazard. Has anyone else had this difficulty ?

Things improved when I stopped using converters and just used the 100-400 lens but I eventually changed to my 70-200mm lens (unfortunately not a f2.8) with a 1.4x converter and this worked well so latterly I was getting lots of "keepers" (jargon for shots that are reasonably sharp and reasonably composed).

I was shooting in high continuous shooting mode with gives me up to 8 frames a second and ended the day with shooting nigh on 1000 images. This made for a lengthy editing process but hopefully as I become more proficient I will be able to use shorter shooting bursts and become a bit more discriminating.

In any case I am proud to present you with my first successful BIF. its something I have long wanted to achieve so all in all a successful day and another notch in the learning process.

One of the other members of the course had a Canon 300mm f2.8 lens ! Now that is a serious piece of glass and even puts John G's old 600m manual focus lens in the shade but nonetheless he was also able to share some cracking action shots wit us this evening.