I think this is my fourth session with kingfishers and I wanted it to be better than the previous ones of course, so I had to do a bit of thinking as to what I wanted to achieve. I have lots of photos of kingfishers on perches, with or without a fish in its bill, so I really wanted to try to create something different.
In this instance I decided to try to get the bird leaving or returning to the perch which has its difficulties largely due to the high speeds of these birds. I used a long zoom lens set at about 400mm and chose a shutter speed in excess of 1/2500 with a frame rate of 20fps. I wasn’t really worried about any noise created by high ISOs as Topaz De-Noise does a great job in removing it in post-processing.

I focused on the perch that the bird was sat on and then just pulled the focal point back a touch as I anticipated that the bird with dive slightly in front of the perch. When it looked like it was going to launch, I simply held down the shutter button until it was back on the perch. This took about three seconds so approx 60 frames were captured from which I could choose the key moment. Some shots from this session are shown below…