Kingfisher (Eight Photographs)

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This is probably one of the more frustrating birds to photograph. They are never close enough even with a 500mm lens, at least in my experience. They fly extremely fast, and though they may sit in one place for a time they fidget a lot. Processing these involved fewer steps than normal but even minimal sharpening was hard to apply without exaggerating the detail. So in some cases I left well enough alone. These shots were taken over three days. They are more than likely not the same bird as there are three birds in the area that I know of. I saw them fish but could not react fast enough to get a shot and of the shots I did get they were hunting dragonflies not fish. Their white feathers meant I needed to under expose to keep detail and that proved problematic as the light changed and foiled some of my attempts. The high ISO I needed to shoot the birds against the backgrounds produced a lot of noise and that has affected image quality a bit. Still very happy with the outcome using the Nikon 200-500 lens.