A Canada goose in flight, one of my better 'in flight' photos

There are a number of ways to take a picture of a bird and it is sort of an evolution in each person's photography. You generally don't start shooting birds in flight right off the bat, but learn to shoot birds sitting or standing still first. There are so many camera settings to adjust to get a great shot and you usually can't make all of these in camera adjustments on the spot. Some cameras (point and shoot) do all of this in camera setup by themselves. Others have a number of 'pages' in the camera (digital). The photographer has to go through most of these pages and make the necessary changes to enable capturing the best shot possible.  It's a huge learning curve.  These settings for sitting or standing birds usually don't work for flying birds, as the shutter speed needs to be approximately 1/2500th of a second or faster for better images of flying birds to stop action and stay in focus. The photo below was taken at 1/4000th of a second, seemingly impossible. My Sony digital camera doesn't have a true manual shutter, but an electronic shutter that enables this fast speed. 

I honestly don't know how long it's taken me to take decent photos of birds in flight, but probably at least 6 months or so. It's not easy to take the shot and get the bird in focus.  It's often confounded by hand-holding your camera/lens (which enables you to more easily track the bird), but adds movement (blur) to the photo. If you were to use a tripod, the camera/lens is more stable, providing less movement (blur) resulting in a cleaner shot, but following a bird in flight with a tripod is a whole 'nother learning curve that I still haven't mastered. Enough of the photography lesson; enjoy the picture below.








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