This was shot on Saturday at a local conservation area whilst waiting for a nesting heron to make an appearance. Unfortunatly, I only have one flash & that was on my other camera which was trained on the herons nest, so, no catchlights in the eyes. The heron never did make an appearance either.

Anyhow, the above shot was taken on an Eos 3 with 100-400L IS lens handheld at 400mm, f/5.6, Fuji Superia 200 & image stabilisation enabled. Out of 20 or so shots of the terns, only about 4 or so are of a reasonable quality.

-- Paul Youd (pauls@deathsdoor.com), August 07, 2000

Answers

Heron do have an elusive nature don't they, a well placed hide works well though. Back to the shot in hand. Photographing birds in flight unless you've spent a lot of prep work on location and working out the birds timing can be very difficult to achieve, for me by the time I've found them in the view finder the shots already gone. So for me this picture works well even with the shadows, I like the fact the birds in the downward wing beat, and you can quite clearly see the red and black parts of the bill telling us it's the common tern, I also like the almost cheeky look in it's eye.

-- Steve Barnett (steve@badgerwatch.com), August 10, 2000.