A Fisherman's Tale

Its been a few weeks since my lost blog post.  My house has been sold and I will be moving soon.  My elderly mother suffered a major heart problem and has been fitted with a pacemaker.  Thankfully, she is now doing well.  My Father suffered a fall and broke his hip.  A few days after having an op complications set in and sadly he passed away in his sleep.

I hope that I will be able to keep the blog updated with a bit more regularity from now on.

My passion for photographing Kingfishers started a few years ago.  It seems that once bitten by "the bug" you have to keep going back and try out new ideas.  Not being satisfied with "a bird on a perch" (although I still take perch shots whenever the opportunity arises) I have tried many different approaches to capture diving shots.  Previous experience told me that the only way to obtain "sharp" diving pictures was to use high speed flash.  Now a few years on and using a Nikon D3 with superb high iso capabilities, I have tried again using the cameras top shutter speed of 8000th sec.  Despite firing hundreds of frames I have yet to obtain a truly sharp image of a diving Kingfisher, however I have managed to get sharp shots of birds erupting from the water and I have posted some of those images here.
I have also included a perch shot which shows a young female taking up an aggressive stance to warn off another Kingfisher that is flying into her territory.

Click on an image to see the larger version.