National Centre for Birds of Prey – Duncombe Park 19th March 22

This was the first of our planned trips for 2022.

A warm and pleasant ‘summer like’ day meant that there were no excuses for Birds in Flight photography failures.

The conditions were good, and light levels high enough to ensure a reasonably low ISO at very high shutter speeds.

After a quick briefing session members were all set up for the flying demonstrations. The birds, ranged from eagles and owls to hawks, and all of them presented different photographic challenges. The demonstrations lasted for an hour, and I think it fair to say that the long lenses and high speed continuous drive modes of our cameras were tested thoroughly with many many frames exposed. We even had a wild Red Kite visit to see what the commotion was all about while the hawks were flying.

Unfortunately I think we all proved that the camera’s worked well but the humans were the weak link! We all agreed that trying to keep the raptors in the frame and focussed was extremely difficult, and many of us ended up with images of blurry grasses / trees, and sky with nothing in it other than perhaps the odd tail feathers disappearing from view!

A hit rate of approx. 5% (20 or so images from a count of more than 400) resulted in my case and some of our members better attempts are shown below. Experts only manage 10% so while I still need more practice the afternoon was a good result

After the flying demonstrations we took the opportunity to take some portrait shots of the birds which was a little easier to achieve, and less stressful!

We all enjoyed the session – it was really good to get out with the camera, particularly because we had such pleasant weather, let’s hope for suitable weather at Spurn Point for our next trip in April

L.J.Foster 20/3/22