Godwits in flight

[Mrudul Godbole]

Photographed in Mangalajodi. Tried to capture a huge flock of Godwit's as they took off.

Canon 80D, Canon 100-400 mm lens, 1/3200, ISO 1250, f7.1, hand held, full frame.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Who wants to count how many of them were in the frame? :-) I think you have zoomed in to click one part of the large flock. Watching large flocks of birds taking off closeby when we are moving in a boat is part of the Chilika story that I used to get excited about as a young kid.

The 1/3200 shutter has ensured that the wings are frozen. A number of birds in this flock are in focus. One can see that the birds are flying at different distances to the camera, so some of them are not in focus because the depth of field using telephoto lenses is kind of few inches. Even increasing one stop ISO and one stop aperture will not be sufficient to cover such a large flock. The other approach to photographing a large flock is to use low shutter speed to get motion blur signifying flock of birds flying.

While telling a story too often we focus on clicking a super close up of a bird or animal and forget to click a group. So always click one habitat/ wide shot to show the large flock or large number of animals and then one can move on to click closeups.

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Vineet Shrivastava]

Nice image and it is surely a large flock. Nice to see so many of them.Thanks for sharing.