The Wild Photographer

Techniques and Settings for Birds-in-Flight Photography

• Episode 40

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Birds in flight are some of the most captivating and challenging subjects in wildlife photography. In this episode, I dive into the art (and a little science) of capturing those perfect airborne shots. Whether it’s a puffin soaring over Alaskan cliffs or a spoonbill gliding over Florida’s wetlands, photographing birds in motion allows you to capture their behavior, beauty, and raw essence—but it’s no easy feat.

I share three key techniques to take your bird-in-flight photography to the next level. From the fundamentals of full-zone and continuous autofocus to the game-changing advancements of modern autofocus tracking, this episode is packed with practical advice for photographers at all levels. I also break down essential camera settings, like how to nail your shutter speed (hint: fast is key), why f/8 is a sweet spot for aperture, and how to let auto ISO handle the rest.

You'll also hear tips on zooming out for easier tracking, using high drive motors for action-packed shots, and even leveraging advanced features like eye-tracking autofocus. Plus, a bonus tip on using image stabilization effectively for panning shots!

Whether you’re a seasoned wildlife photographer or just starting out, these strategies will help you transform fleeting moments into stunning images. Tune in, take notes, and get ready to bring a little more "wow" to your wildlife photography. Don’t forget to drop me a message with your own questions—I’d love to feature them in future episodes!

Expect to Learn: 

  • Mastering Autofocus: Full Zone and Continuous Mode
  • Leverage Autofocus Tracking for Precision
  • Optimize Camera Settings for Birds in Motion
  • Zoom Out to Keep Birds in Frame
  • Use High Drive Motors for Action Shots

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Court Whelan (00:06)
I will be the first to admit that I am not an ardent bird photographer. I view birds as one of the many amazing critters to photograph when you're out on wildlife adventures. So while I do photograph them, there's one way in particular that I prioritize over all others. And that's photographing birds in flight. And that's the subject of today's little crash course on bird in flight photography. I don't need to convince you as to why it's amazing to photograph birds in flight.

is what they do. You're capturing their very essence, their behavior. And it is really spectacular when you see a photo with all the wings and crisp, sharp focus and a bird soaring in the air against a blue sky or heck, even a gray sky or maybe above the ocean surface. Birds in flight. It's an amazing way to photograph birds, amazing way to photograph wildlife and maybe more important than anything for the sake of this conversation. It's one of the hardest things to do in the world of wildlife photography. So today I'm going to be presenting you with

three tried and true techniques for the way I photograph birds in flight. Before we begin, a couple of quick things I'd like to go over is we would love to hear from you at Wild Photographer Podcast. You can do so by leaving fan mail, which is something that's on your podcast app itself, whether it's with Apple iTunes or I guess it's not iTunes, it's Apple podcasts. Whether you're listening on YouTube or Spotify, there's a way you can drop a note there.

Or you can leave a comment in my YouTube channel itself. post all these podcasts on my YouTube channel. That's just Court Whelan on YouTube. So just search court whelan or the wild photographer court Whelan. And if you drop a comment on any video, I will see it. And more importantly than just any sort of comment, I'd love to hear what episodes you'd be interested in hearing about. And equal to that, I'd love to answer fan mail online. If you have a question about photography.

doesn't have to be about a certain episode, but any question about wildlife, landscape, travel, photography, something I'm baking in building into all my episodes is answering those questions during each episode. We've got one coming up in just a little bit that I'd love to answer for you as well. So drop comment, leave a comment, drop a fan mail. You can also email me at wild photographer podcast, or sorry, I should say at wild photographer dot podcast at gmail.com would love to hear.

those questions, I'd love to hear comments, feedback on the episodes and so on and so forth. In addition, as always, shout out to lensrentals.com where I rent all my lenses from so I can go out in the field with some of the best, most innovative gear out there. If you use the code wildphotographer15, you're going to get 15 % off your lens rental order. You can also buy lenses from them. And I think it's a really, really great technique or practice to rent a lens before you buy it.

not only to see if you like that category of lens, it might be a big fancy lens, you're not sure if you want to drop that money on or sometimes lenses can vary from actual product to product from from lens to lens. So if you rent it ahead of time, you know, it's a tack sharp, crisp version of that lens that you can then hang on to and keep afterwards. So it's a really, really great technique. Again, lens rentals dot com is a great source for renting lenses. Without further ado.

Let's get into the episode on three ways to photograph birds in flight. OK, I'm going to start off with one that is kind of fooled you there. The first the first technique is really not a great technique, but it's one that is there. You should know about it and it's the point and hope technique. And I want to put this out there because, of course, you can use your autofocus and you can point and hope that you catch that bird in crisp focus. But.

The main reason I'm talking about this technique is because it pales in comparison to the other two techniques, which are really rock solid and will get you amazing results each and every time. But the point and hope technique is of course a technique you're sitting there. You're in a metal skiff and the Amazon. You are in a dugout canoe and the Okavango Delta. You're in a safari vehicle. You're on foot. You're walking through a forest. You name it and you have your center focus point on your camera and you're tracking that bird across the sky. Right.

and you have your settings dialed in and you snap snap snap away and you hope that bird is in autofocus as you depress that shutter and focus on that subject and snap. It is faulty. It is a technique, but what you're going to see from these next two techniques is that is really just the point and hope technique, which is not all that great of a technique at all. So maybe I'll rename the episode by the time this goes live, but the next two techniques are

really, really tried and true for locking that focus and getting multiple shots over a specific scene.

but the next two techniques are really the bread and butter of all this. Two different ways, two quite different techniques based on your camera, based on your fluency of the camera's autofocus motor to get you crisp bird photos, multiple photos as that bird is flying across the sky. And I will say after I go over these two specific techniques for how to set and use your autofocus, I'm going to talk a bit more about the settings that you need. So this would be the actual mode in your camera and your shutter speed, aperture, ISO.

as well as exposure and even white balance. So without further ado, let's talk about the technique that I've been using for the majority of my photography career. And this is a combination of full autofocus zone and continuous focus. So there are two things in your camera you're going to need to dial in to make this function useful for you. The first is moving off of that center point autofocus. This is the only time, well,

almost the only time I'm ever going to move off that center point autofocus. And what I mean by center point is usually cameras will have just the dead middle of your screen, dead middle of your frame, your viewfinder, your touchscreen, whatever it might be. The dead middle is where it's going to focus each and every time. This is amazing for all other wildlife photography because you know exactly where the focus point is. It's amazing for landscape photography, cultural travel photography. That's what I have it set on all the time.

except when I'm on say the Kinabatangan River in Borneo and I'm watching the hornbill birds fly across this massive river or I'm photographing egrets in Florida, spoonbills in the Southeast of the United States, puffins in Alaska, you name it. I'm going for awesome, awesome bird photography. I'm going to shift that. I'm going to switch it away from center point autofocus to actually focus on the entire frame. The entire viewfinder is going to my focus point.

And what that does is it allows the camera to choose where it thinks the autofocus point should be. Now you've heard me time and time again say that letting the camera choose too much, especially where to focus is dangerous. But for bird photography, this is a really, really powerful tool because you have that motion and for nine times out of 10, it's set across a relatively blank background, like a sky, like a forest where trees are far away. And so the camera actually does a very, very good job of

picking out which zone in that full frame should be in focus because there is a subject that's closer to you. There's a moving subject that is that bird. So allowing the camera to choose where in the frame it focuses is a really powerful tool for birds in flight. Second to that, and you have to use both of these in concert. You can't just use one or the other and expect great results. The second is setting your focusing mode on continuous focus versus single shot.

Now, when I'm photographing a beautiful landscape or even sedentary wildlife, I'm on single shot each and every time. I want every time I depress that shutter for it to refocus and lock in that focus to allow me to fully press the shutter and take the shot. That means that the critter is unlikely to move in that split second where I hold the shutter halfway in focus and then press it all the way to take the shot. Now the thing with moving birds, flying birds, soaring birds, birds in flight,

is that between those times we're talking about a split second is that bird's probably moving and that'd be great if it's moving at an equal distance away from you, meaning it's completely perpendicular left to right or right to left. But again, nine times out of 10, it's moving towards you or away from you at some rate. What that does is that means your autofocus is going to need to change in that split second. So by putting it on continuous autofocus,

As you hold that shutter halfway down, it's going to refocus in that focusing zone. So if you're putting these two and two together, what this is doing is it's getting the camera to choose what should be focused, meaning it's going to choose your entire frame. As long as you're able to aim your lens, aim your camera at that moving bird and keep it in your frame as you track it across the sky, it's going to pick the focus point and then having on continuous focusing mode is you're going to allow the camera to refocus every

Split second so that way as the bird moves the focus tracks and moves as well This is almost a way of saying you and your camera are gonna be tracking the bird as it moves across the sky Now if you are an advanced camera user, you probably picked up on that word tracking and you're like Well, why don't I just put on my auto focus tracking mode hang tight? We're gonna get to that as the second big mode But I wanted to start off with this because this is the this is a way to photograph birds in flight that any camera will allow you to do

Point and shoot, advanced point and shoot, big fancy DSLR and mirrorless. This combination has existed really for the last 20 years of camera technology. So anybody in the audience listening to this, this is a tried and true method. Before I go into that more advanced technique that has really surfaced in the last few years. So once again, I'm gonna reiterate this full zone auto-focus. So your entire frame is something that the camera will focus on, whether the birds in the top right or bottom left or dead middle.

It's going to pick up that focus point and then continuous focusing. it readjusts as you hold that shutter down halfway while you're moving across the sky, keeping that bird somewhere in your viewfinder. And again, the brilliance here is somewhere in your viewfinder. You don't have to keep it in the middle because your auto focus zone will move across your screen. As the bird moves in your frame, it is hard to keep the bird in the dead middle of your frame, especially if you're zoomed in.

So this combination of two settings is going to be brilliant. And if you haven't tried this yet, it's gonna be a game changer for getting really, really great bird and flight photos.

One trick with this is that you are going to likely want to zoom out or use a little bit less telephoto than you might want in your ending photo, your result photo. So that allows you to be able to focus on the bird a little bit easier. So that allows you to track the bird in the sky a little bit easier because if you're zoomed out, it is much easier to keep that bird somewhere in the box of your frame versus if you're filling the frame with a bird.

at 500 millimeters, let's say, and moving across the sky, who knows, it could be moving a little bit erratically. If you can zoom out, which I highly advocate for, it's gonna keep the bird in your frame a lot, a lot easier. Now, the second technique is something that's emerged in the last, gosh, let's say five years of camera tech, and this is really, really correlated and paired with mirrorless cameras more than DSLRs.

You can technically do this on a DSLR if you're shooting on live mode, but I know many of you that are intermediate or advanced today are shooting on a mirrorless camera. And now that there is no mirror in place and you're actually able to basically be shooting on live mode the whole time, not a setting you need to set, but just shooting on normal mode in your mirrorless camera, it allows you to enable what's called auto-focus tracking mode. Now this is something you're going to have to go into your camera and set on.

But auto-focus tracking is something that is featured on pretty much every mirrorless camera from introductory all the way to most fanciest and advanced cameras out there. And believe it or not, by tracking mode, once again, by holding your shutter halfway down, it is going to track that bird across the sky in a really, effective way. It essentially is.

automatically doing what we just talked about in the previous mode where you're combining this full zone autofocus with continuous focus. Tracking just puts all that and packages it into one mode, one technique. And really, if you have the option to do this, this is the way to go for sure. Now with autofocus tracking, you're still going to want to put your camera on continuous focusing.

I should clarify that a little bit that continuous focusing is often called something different depending on the camera system you have. Most cameras out there are gonna call it continuous focus because it's calling it exactly what it is. For some reason Canon systems, for some reason Canon systems like to call it servo focus, S-E-R-V-O. And this is again, the way of telling your camera as you hold that shutter width halfway down to focus or using your back button focus, whatever.

technique you personally like to use, is continuously refocusing to focus on that subject that is locked in in your frame. So autofocus tracking is pretty incredible. A couple of pro tips there is that if you do have this feature in your camera, one slight hurdle is figuring out where in your camera this exists. It's nine times out of 10 in some sort of autofocus menu system.

Sometimes it's a button in the back of your camera. Sometimes you can access it from your viewfinder But autofocus tracking is always give me somewhere in your menu system most cameras now especially again ones in the last few years are going to allow you to take this one step further and actually even focus for Take this one step further and prioritize for focusing on either animals or people and the difference really is just the amount of space in the frame or this

the size of the thing you're trying to focus on. If you, like I'm suggesting here, set it on animal focus, it's going to be able to pick out that smaller bird a lot easier. And I'm not done there. There's one further delineation you can set in most cameras, and that's actually focusing, yes, believe it or not, on the eye. And you've probably heard me say in many other podcasts that no matter what wildlife you're focusing on, I guess pun intended there, no matter what animal you are photographing,

The one thing you're really gonna really want in focus is the eye. So you've got several layers of specificity here. You can turn on auto-focus tracking that tracks the animal across your frame versus letting the camera just try to choose which box it's in. It's actually gonna track it actively as it moves. Brilliant, brilliant thing. But then you're gonna also be able to specify that it's an animal, so smaller size, and then furthermore, the animal's eye. So again, it's kind of mind-blowing how good this works in today's digital camera world.

And if you haven't used it yet, especially for bird photography, it really turns this once very, challenging point and hope technique into an automatic 99 times out of 100 as you use this technique and track a bird across the sky, tack sharp, beautiful photos each and every time. So those are the main modes, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's actually a couple of other key settings you're going to want to dial in. And this is your traditional camera suite or trifecta.

of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. This is equally important no matter which of these two or three techniques you're using, you still need to set these three things to get really, really great bird and flight photography. So the first thing let's talk about, which I would say is probably the most important, is going to be your shutter speed. Nine times out of 10, you are going to want tack sharp focus of the bird. Let's say 99 times out of 100.

There are very, few cases where you want to deliberately blur a bird in flight photo. So you want it tack sharp. You want a fast shutter speed. What is a fast shutter speed for bird photography for flying bird photography? Well, it's fast. We're talking about one over a thousand at very, very least one over twelve fifty better. One of a sixteen hundred tends to be my sweet spot. Now you might be saying court. Holy cow. This is really, really fast. I don't normally shoot wildlife this fast. Usually I have

pretty major limiting factors, i.e. not enough light in my scene. Well, what happens is because most of the time that you're photographing birds in flight, you're aiming at the sky or aiming in bright scenarios, that fast shutter speed is not gonna be a problem. You're gonna be able to shoot that fast. So dial in 1 over 1250, dial in 1 over 1600, and you're gonna get it each and every time. Now, the second thing that's important is going to be your aperture. I have a very specific demand in aperture when I'm shooting birds in flight.

For most wildlife photography, especially portrait photography, I'm shooting on the smallest F number I can muster, which means F4, F5.6. If I have a really big, fancy, expensive lens, I can shoot at F2.8. But I'm actually gonna be going the other direction here, and I'm gonna be shooting usually at F8 each and every time. The reason for this is because when that autofocus, whether it's tracking, whether it's the point and hope technique, whether it's this combination of

full autofocus zone with continuous shooting. Believe it or not, no matter how great you are, no matter how great the camera is, it may not get the entire bird in focus each and every time. So I actually want to set a pretty wide depth of field. I don't want it to be super shallow at f2.8. I don't want it to be f4. I really want to bump that up to f8 so that if I do miss focus, if that eye is not in the same plane of focus as the tail feathers and I do want the whole subject in focus,

F8 does the trick and it works each and every time. So that leaves ISO as sort of like the last kind of piece of the puzzle, this last component of the trifecta. ISO in this case is truly just a means to an end. And I do not hesitate ramping up to a high ISO. But I don't just set my ISO willy nilly. I don't set it on full manual. I will use manual to allow me to set a very, specific shutter speed, very specific aperture, like I just said, and then will put it on

auto ISO so that way the camera in that very frenzied moment of a bird flying across the sky across my scene. The camera knows the right ISO to balance the lighting conditions to get me the shutter speed I need. Get me the aperture I need and then set it whatever ISO accomplishes that task even if it's high even if it's low. High ISOs I don't worry about here because I don't mind if there's a little bit of grain in the photo.

When most of the scene is bright blue sky or even bright white gray sky, a little bit of graininess is not going to show up that bird because it has textures in the hair feathers and the plumage. That's just a hair feathers. Geez. Not not not great biologists talk here. The feathers or the coloration, the texture going on with the bird, you're not going to notice that grain very much. So if you're seeing your ISO being forced,

up to 1600 up to 3200 don't worry about it your aperture and your shutter speed are so important to nail at that one over 1600 at that f8 I don't care what ISO it takes to get me those features I don't care what ISO it takes to get me those other two components so I put it on auto and I let the camera do that deciding for me

Now the next component is going to be exposure. Because we're using an auto ISO and the rest of its manual, it still allows me to compensate the exposure via the normal exposure compensation method, which is to overexpose or underexpose on that dial. You can go to the plus side by 1 third, 2 thirds, one full stop to brighten it. You can go to the negative side by 1 third, 2 thirds, negative one full stop to darken it.

What I generally do is shoot on even, I'm not saying it's going to be perfect out of the camera. Sometimes I will purposely overexpose. I don't very often purposely underexpose, but I do often overexpose. Why? Well, it's usually because the sky is being quite bright around the bird. Even if the sun is shining on the bird nicely, which is really just going to be happenstance. It's going to be kind of luck of my positioning and the bird's positioning. I'm probably going to want to force a little bit of

I'm probably gonna wanna force a little bit more light on that bird because the camera, since it's choosing the exposure for me, since I'm shooting on this manual plus auto ISO technique, with that enormous bright blue sky in the background, it's probably going to underexpose my shot a little bit, which is going to falsely underexpose my bird. Now I wanna be careful with this and I'm not blowing things out, I'm not going.

Usually I'm not going to a full stop of over exposure or two stops or anything like that I'm usually over exposing by one third or two thirds of a stop just to bring in a touch more light and then truthfully I am relying on Photoshop I'm relying on Lightroom to do the rest of the editing to bring the shadows up to lighten the shadows to lighten the exposure of the bird itself The final part is white balance and this little bit of trick question because I don't worry about the white balance too much

You've probably heard my other podcasts, other discussions where I worry about the white balance quite a bit. I set my white balance for the day or for the trip or for the region that I'm photographing in. But when I'm photographing birds in flight, because you have such a dominant light source, such a dominant bright background, it's probably going to skew the white balance a little bit anyway. I just know that with my birds in flight photo, even if it's part of a larger album, a larger portfolio, part of a big trip of photography.

I'm probably going to need to tweak the white balance in Lightroom or Photoshop with each bird in flight photo. Now the reality is over the course of let's say a 12 day Borneo expedition of the 3000 other photos I'm going to get or gosh even 10,000 photos or gosh even other 10,000 photos I'm going to get my bird in flight photos are probably going to be in the dozens. So it doesn't actually add all that much time to my workflow to custom set the white balance after the fact when I'm

editing a Photoshop or Lightroom. Just make sure that you're shooting in RAW so you don't lose any data, you don't lose any quality of your image as you're shifting to a different white balance. And really the white balance you choose, whether it's the warm tones of a cloudy white balance or the cooler blue tones of a daylight white balance, it's gonna be very much up to your personal preference of what that ultimate image might look like. And frankly, to me, what I end up choosing,

might be the color of the bird. If I have a white stork or a white egret, I might choose a different white balance and I'm shooting a Bromany kite or might be shooting a bald eagle or shooting a pink spoon bill. So I really use white balance predominantly after the shot on the computer for my bird and flight photography.

And so that's that's pretty much it. I could go on and on about each and every specific scenario of what the bird might look like, where it's flying. But this is a crash course in the main three techniques for great bird and flight photography. And as you can see, I really am just distilling it down to two dominant techniques. The idea of using that center point autofocus and tracking across the sky is not going to be super duper reliable. It's not going to be super duper reliable.

Really what I've done for ages, for years, for a couple of decades plus is use that combination of a full zone auto focus, letting the camera choose anywhere in the frame to auto focus because of that uniform background, which is appearing in nine out of 10 times with birds flight. And then it continuous auto focus. Those two things mixed with those exact camera settings of F eight, one of her 1600 shutter speed and auto ISO is going to get you great results. However, like I've said,

A new advancement in camera tech is this auto-focus tracking, which I have just been amazed with, with photographing birds around the world, whether it's puffins in Alaska or lilac-breasted rollers in Africa, that auto-focus tracking technique is just producing insane results. So if you have that capacity in your camera and your exact make and model, highly recommend that. As a bonus tip for those advanced users with bigger, fancier lenses,

I'm gonna advocate that you do one more thing and that's actually your auto and that's actually your image stabilization mode. Oftentimes on lenses you're gonna see a few different custom settings, little knobs you can physically, little knobs you can physically switch from one to two to three. What you'll notice on the bigger fancier lenses is that there is a image stabilization for, there's an image stabilization.

There are two to three image stabilization types. One is going to be full zone, up and down, left and right image stabilization. So that's what you're gonna have your camera on the vast majority of the time. However, if you set it on image stabilization two, and I should step back and say, IS or image stabilization is the same thing as vibration reduction in Nikon or a myriad of other terms with different camera platforms. But this idea of stabilizing your shot,

When you put it on zone two, what that's going to do is only stabilize your lens and your camera on the up and down. And it's not going to try to stabilize in the left and the right. Why is this important for bird photography? Because you're tracking that bird. So as you move across the sky, if you have your image stabilization set on one mode, one, it's going to actually slightly adjust that left and right movement because it thinks you're very unstable. But the reality is you're deliberately moving across the sky.

The reality is you're deliberately moving across the sky. are intentionally panning and you don't want that lens and that IS system to constantly be adjusting because it could throw off your shot just a little bit.

So there you have it. We have a.

So there you have it, little crash course in bird and flight photography. I hope this helps you the next time you're out in the field photographing a really, really exciting way to photograph wildlife. think, you know, personally, it's one of my favorite ways to photograph birds. You can see the color because it's in the bright sky. You can see the behavior and the movement that allows you to get the little nuanced textures of the feathers and the beak and the expression of the bird. It's a heck of a lot better than trying to photograph and focus within a bush or trees or high in the canopy.

It's a really brilliant way to capture a stunning part of any wildlife adventure.

Today's listener question is one that's quite appropriate to bird photography and it's about drive motors. And the listener writes in, when do you normally use single shot versus multiple shot or high drive motor for wildlife photography? And this is a great question because I do use all these different drive motors. In fact, one of my upcoming episodes is going to be on the various camera settings and drive motors are really...

In fact, one of my upcoming episodes is going to be all about the key camera settings, when and how to change them. And drive motor is a big, big one that I change throughout each and every day. So drive motor is basically your way of telling your camera how many shots do you want to take per second? And the average camera is probably able to shoot somewhere between three and six, three and six photos per second. But the bigger fancier cameras nowadays are able to shoot something like 20 to 30 frames a second.

and they usually have three to five different levels of just a single frame icon. That means every time you press the shutter, the camera holds at only shooting one photo at a time, meaning you can hold that shutter down as long as you want, but it's only taking that one photo. This is really helpful if I have been taking photos of polar bears in the tundra all day and these polar bears are just sitting there, they're napping, they're not moving a whole lot. And I just basically just don't.

And I basically don't want to take too many photos to have to cull and edit and process and sift through. However, as soon as I see any sort of wildlife movement or behavior, I'm going to start ramping that up. So I might want to take the next segment. want to take, so I might want to take the next level of speed. So if I shift from that one icon of a square to say three squares kind of stacked on top of one another, that allows me to get a little bit faster.

So as soon as I shift from that one square icon to the three square icon, that usually allows me to take about six photos a second on my camera system. This is really nice. If I know I don't want to take 20 photos a second, that's a lot to handle, a lot to process. But I know I want a few different photos to choose from, from that individual behavior, from the individual scene. For birds in flight, so specific to this day's episode.

I'm going to ramp it all the way up to a really, really high drive motor. I want to take 10 to 20 photos per second because as I'm tracking that bird across the sky, I might only get one second where that bird is in perfect lighting, where it's sort of facing me. I can see the profile. I can see the eye. The tail feathers are spreading a certain way. So I want to maximize the number of photos I'm able to sort and sift through. So I want to go on a very, very high drive motor to get back to the general question here of when

else I might have a very high drive motor on, it's going to be for any sort of wildlife behavior where things are happening fast. This would be at the extreme end of wildlife behavior like bears sparring or animals fishing for salmon in the river or a chase of a cheetah and a gazelle across the savannas of Africa. You would be surprised how even 20 frames a second there's going to be one photo from that second that is going to be the best of the whole that is going to be the best of the entire sequence.

So I'm only gonna set it on a really, really high, fast drive motor when there is frenetic, kind of chaotic, very, very fast paced motion. Getting back to today's episode, a bird in flight fits that category for me. When that bird is flying, it's pretty fast paced, there are slight nuances from millisecond to millisecond, and I wanna capture as many shots as I possibly can. Anything in the middle is gonna be kind of a nice hedging my bets, but I'm only shooting on that single frame.

but I'm only shooting on that single shot when things are really slow. So I do that for all my landscape shots. I do that for wildlife that is not moving or I've taken a lot of photos of already. But again, anytime the action unfolds, I want to have my camera at the ready. I want to be very, very versed in how to switch my camera from one shot to multiple shot drive motor in a split second because I want to be ready for that action and capture multiple shots of really, really exciting scenes.

So that wraps up today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in as always. Just a reminder, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a message, drop me an email at wildphotographer.podcast at Gmail. Leave me a comment on YouTube or podcast fan mail. I'd love to hear from you. And getting to this listener question topic, I would love to answer one of your questions on an upcoming episode. So I hope you enjoyed today's crash course on bird and flight photography. We'll talk to you next time. Thanks.


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Court Whelan

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