Tips for small BIF shots (1 Viewer)

Been trying to get some good small BIF shots, I feel I'm almost there but usually the little buggers move way to fast for me to even keep them in frame most of the time.

Any tips from the experts?

At the moment I use manual exposure, 1/1600 or 1/2000, f5.6 sometimes 6.3 and start my iso at 800 and adjust to suit the light. This is all at 400mm.

I'll attach some swallow shots I've taken today.

Welcome to my world.

It took me around 200 attempts with my 7D and 100-400 to end up with this pair of mediocre shots. The light was mostly not in my favour, but I kept plugging away. I'd love to know the secret of success too.

I was looking at Chris Galvins web site and he had some excellent flight shots of Swifts. I think I know where he took them and when I went (no time for photos sadly) there were lots of them and many of them seemed to follow a flight pattern. So...................my theory is.................
Get the right place, set up and have plenty of patience (and a big memory card:-O)

Tips for small BIF shots? Stand further away or use a shorter focal length lens.... or did I misunderstand the question?

Seriously though, I was trying to figure this out earlier in the year after an amazing experience on a walk around a recently opened nature reserve. I was standing on a path overlooking a flooded quarry site and had swifts and swallows at, or below, eye level flying up the bank straight towards me and along the path past me - so close I could feel the disturbed air of their wingbeats on my face! Problem was, it was all too frantic and fast to photograph unless someone invents some hyperspeed autofocus system.

One thing I have been playing around with is the "catch-in-focus" facility on my Pentax, whereby I can set everything to manual, half press the shutter release and get confirmation when the subject moves into focus. I think a bit more experimentation and I'll give it a go at BIF on some smaller subjects. still needs cat-like reflexes though for some birds, but half the fun is trying. ||

I think everyone's got it so far. Fast shutter speed, higher ISO if needed, lots of patience, and fire away as many frames as you can. Even a good photographer probably needs dozens or hundreds of shots to get one good one...versus maybe 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 for a larger bird. Good panning technique, possibly trying prefocus, especially when dealing with the small birds who love to follow patterns. Observe for a while, and often you'll find them circling through the same area several times, so you might be able to stay prefocused for that spot or distance, and be ready for when they come back that way again. Spray and prey, sadly, is the order of the day!

BTW - if you're lucky enough to catch them against a blue sky or neutral background, you can likely as not get away with multipoint continuous AF and the camera should have no problem finding the little dark bird...but get him in front of some cluttered background, and it gets a lot harder to AF - the multipoint systems often have too much of interest to latch onto other than your birdie, and the spot focus is often too much a challenge to keep the spot on the fast and frenetic little guy. I often try manual focus in these situations...and usually do try a little prefocus - I pick an object at roughly the focal distance where I've seen the bird flying, somewhere ahead of him, then as he moves into the area I am trying to catch him, I'll start panning and he's a little easier to find since your focus is probably pretty close...slight adjustments while firing off a burst are easy, since in manual the camera doesn't need to wait for focus confirm to shoot. I'll sometimes run through a range of focus, hoping that somewhere in the sequence I might have landed a proper focus.

I need much more patience and practice with little birds in flight - my biggest impediment is weather - so far, I've mostly tried to shoot little birds this summer, when temps are running close to 100 f and humidity nearly the same...so I just don't have the patience or endurance to stand there taking 200 frames...I try a single burst of 15-20 frames, then walk away to the next shot - only knowing when I got home if any of them worked. This winter, in cooler weather, hopefully I'll get more chances.

Another "fieldcraft" trick which works - especially (but not only) for hirundines - is to pick a breezy day to be out: if you position yourself appropriately (so that the birds are flying upwind to you) you'll see that they're flying much more slowly than they usually do, making it more likely you'll get onto them.

A technique I've used recently at Oare Marshes is to capture small birds (waders) as they land, or even better, as they look for a place to land.

For terns I've had the most success on calm days, when there's no waves and ripples in the water that can confuse the autofocus.