Sandhill Crane over Paynes Prairie

One for Jeffrey Lee - you make it look too easy! We had 5,000 sandhill

cranes winter on Paynes Prairie State Preserve this year which gave

photographers plenty of chances to capture these magnificent birds in

flight...my success rate was not very high, but perseverence pays off in

the end.... Cheers, RickDB

Great shot, Rick. I like everything here from the dynamics of wings to framing. Indeed, it looks effortless in Jeffrey's images but in fact is extremely hard to capture. You keep surprising me by the versatility of your technique. Cheers, Vadim

Thanks for your kind comments, and you are right, this is a lot harder than it looks. I really was after the blurred wing tips to give a sense of movement - a shutter speed of 1/400th seemed to work best. Auto-focussing with the 100-400 zoom is not so fast and I found manual focussing seemed to give better results. However, many shots were unacceptable because of camera shake and incorrect focussing - I suspect most photographers take many shots before they capture a keeper! Cheers! RickDB