A missed opportunity

[Prajwal J Ullal]

Well It had been some time since I had been doing Bird photography, so one fine cloudy noon I planned capturing the scavenging Kites. Though most of them were too far off for the 250mm lens, yet had spent more than an hour to capture a decent frame, with Auto Focus off, and all of a sudden three of the Kites flew in very close to my balcony, post an on-flight fight and for an instant it was close enough, but too fast for me to focus in and get a proper frame. Could get hold of this frame, though not properly focused.

EXIF:
F/5.6
Shutterspeed:1/320
ISO 800
Manual Exposure
Focal Length 250mm

[Abhishek Jamalabad]

Not an easy one. The focus, though not spot on, looks decent to me given you were manually tracking it. How come the BG is so bright? Did you dial a +ve EC?
TFS

[Atul Sinai]

Decent job. As you mentioned needs to get better. Focusing is a challenge when the bird is approaching towards you. Also you would require higher shutter speed to freeze the action.
Keep practicing and you'll get better. Generally, black kites, crows and pigeons are good subjects to practice birds in flight.

Thanks for sharing.

[Mrudul Godbole]

The flight pose is nice. Good eye contact. The light seems to be bad. Agree with the above comments. Using manual focus can be tricky for birds in flight, you can start with Auto focus and then shift to manual later. Thanks for sharing.

[Prajwal J Ullal]

Thanks for all your views and suggestions :)
Well it was difficult to get sharp focus using auto Focus and most of the times the cam would be searching from infinity to zero for the focus point, so had to switch to manual focus
@Abhishek, It was cloudy due to which the lighting seemed improper and I had to keep it overexposed to capture most of the details as prior attempts proved the Black kite as a Crow with just the silhouette being a more prominent feature. And since this was a very instantaneous incident couldnt play with the exposure.