A Bit of BIF

Gimme a Pink Foot (remembering Bessie Smith and George Melly)

I like BIF (Bird In Flight) shots. Photographing action is always a challenge, you are bound to get many failures but a really good shot can be exciting. You don't get time to think when the action is happening, so you have to do your thinking before the action happens.
At the end of January I visited Martin Mere again. I chose a day when the weather forecast was for a cold day with sunny spells but a very strong south west wind. I was hoping for a nice blue sky, which is important for BIF shots, and for a head wind when the birds were flying towards the sun to make them work harder and to give me more time. The forecast was accurate, although the clouds built up in the afternoon.
I installed myself in the corner of the Ron Barker hide and spent most of my day there. Conditions were good for BIF shots as the wind tended to push the birds closer to the hide than usual. In one case a pink foot came so close to the hide that I was able to get a solo portrait with my 500mm lens and 1.4 converter.

However the day was far from a complete success; of course the wind caused some problems, general bird activity was low, the wigeon stayed on the water and the barn owl failed to show at all. For one reason or another I dipped out on the few groups of whooper swans that came through and my shots of shelduck and cormorants were disappointing. The pink-footed geese were the stars: there was regular air traffic of small parties between the neighbouring farmland and the reserve, with occasional mass flights when thousands of geese were scared from the fields or spooked by a bird of prey.

Mostly I was shooting a few of the geese in a larger party. I find it impossible to avoid getting many shots where some birds are clipped and cropped by the edge of the frame; sometimes they can be cropped out entirely, which I did for the first shot below, but this is not always possible. Frustratingly, I couldn't avoid getting many photos where a goose's head was hidden behind the wings of the one in front or one of the geese was out of focus because it was significantly further from the camera, or nearer to it. You have to expect a high reject rate with BIF shots.

I like the way that geese fly in almost perfect synchronisation, but each goose has an individual pose; I find these shapes are as satisfying as the rhymes in a well-constructed poem.
I think the third shot, below, has the best arrangement of the geese, but its composition would be better if there were a little more sky on the left hand side (I suppose I could add some with Photoshop, but I don't like the idea).

Which leads me to an unexpected problem, I was experimenting with a new bean bag for these photos and I found that it didn't let me pan the lens properly. Better panning might have improved the composition of the previous photo. A bean bag is fine for holding the lens steady, but it makes panning jerky so that quite a few of my photos were blurred due to camera shake at a shutter speed of 1/1000s - which I didn't think would be possible until I saw the photos. In future I will go back to resting the lens on the window frame of the hide, so that I can pan smoothly.