They’re back—the ospreys. I love these birds. What’s better is that I found a way to photograph them so I have more keepers. I’ve gotten too many bad photos.

In the past, most of the photos I’ve taken of these birds have been blurry. What I’ve posted have been the few clear shots I got. The problem is that the ospreys are diving, zigzagging, trying to elude other ospreys and seagulls that are trying to steal their catches and I, in the meantime, am trying to following them with a heavy camera and telephoto lens as I turn, look up, and generally try to keep my balance on unlevel and even rocky ground.

What I suddenly realized, just last Friday, was that it wasn’t camera motion or the motion of the birds that was causing the blurring and my singular lack of success in getting good shots, it was that I was using single-point autofocus and I wasn’t usually hitting the bird with that one point the camera was using for focus. So, my focus was on the background, either clouds or sky, which is like focusing at infinity. But the birds, my intended targets, were, at most, a few hundred yards away. And that, of course, is why so many of the osprey shots  I’d taken had been blurry.

So, I expanded the focus area to nine points and was standing on the south jetty of the Rogue River, early Saturday morning. As I snapped photos I was sure I was getting good shots, but it’s hard to tell on the Canon 5D Mark III’s  little screen. I wasn’t going to know until I got home and downloaded them.

What follows, and there are plenty of them, are some of the better shots. I’m going to run a bunch of them over the next few days. All are without captions.

Oh, I used my Canon EF 400mm f/5.6 L USM Lens and all were taken at 1/1000 of a second and f/7.1. I let the ISO drift.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 15th, 2013 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Ospreys, Ospreys Catching Fish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.