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How do you focus on birds in flight? I'm not quick enough to manual focus and auto focus is either too slow or wants to focus on the sky... what do I do?

Also... is it posible to shoot bats in flight? I don't know how to get pictures of such fast moving d00ds and in such a dark environment. They don't come out until after sunset. We've got a bunch of bats at the local park and I've learned how to lure them into the frame with a tennis ball... but I don't know how to get the shot.
(As for the tennis ball thing... it's kinda neat... if you toss a tennis ball up into the air the bats will swoop in to investigate and you can keep them interested for almost 15 minutes before they go elsewhere!)

That's cool about the tennis ball thing!

For the bats, you'll need a flash, and a good one. A strobe on a stand or two would be better. Probably have to set up your focus and exposure ahead of time. Burst mode would be nice but your flash probably wouldn't keep up.

For birds, your focal plane is deeper at a smaller aperture, so you can try that - but don't let your shutter speed get too low. One drawback of a Canon as opposed to a Nikon is the Nikons will generally focus faster, and the Rebel is of course entry level to begin with. Not sure how I'd go about it, as I've not tried that one.

These are my only 2 pictures of a bird in flight.

Background story... there's this ugly turkey vulture that likes to sit in the 4th floor windows of the office building across the street from where I work. Well, he happened to be there the day I was photographing the kitten and so I went across the street to try and get some pictures.

He was just sitting there in the window, but we was watching me aproach from over his shoulder. I get about 30 yards out from the building (and 4 stories down from him) and start playing with camera settings to get some pictures of him sitting there... but the d00d was camera shy and flew off before I could get any pictures. So I turn the knob into basic mode and got these two snapshots before he got over the building:




(oh, and each of these is with a MAJOR crop )

People write books about how to photograph birds. I've not read any of them.

I am going on some guess work (most my photography has been B&W and slow subjects, not done much on digital other than my point and click) but your best bet would be to practice with your manual focus. Focus on an area close to where you think a bird will fly. If you actually sit and watch there are areas where birds like to fly to take advantage of thermals, in parks where they zoom through the open areas to get from place to place instead of the wooded areas, watch for nests, in general high traffic areas. Focus on that rough area then practice fine tuning your focus. When a bird flys through your zone you will be ready for him. Once again though the problem is taking the time to watch for flight patterns to catch them.
If you want a better pic of your turkey buzzard and you see him sitting in his spot again setup where you could get a good pic of him flying as he did in these pics and have a friend approach him the same way you did. More than likely he will do a similar flightpath as he did with you.

To be honest, I have no idea of what the best technique would be for shooting birds in flight. One thing that comes to mind would be to try and find one close to the ground in order to keep the sky from blowing out the image.

I've gotta show the most amazing capture I've ever seen of a bird in flight. This was posted over at Photo.net a long time ago and I thought it was simply amazing.



If you want to see more of this guy's amazing work follow this link to his website: http://www.miguellasa.com/ Sometimes it helps to give you ideas if you take some time to look at what some of the pros do, try to figure it out, and then try to reproduce it yourself.

Hopefully I can help out a bit.

Firstly, catching birds in flight is quite possibly one of the most difficult and yet rewarding skills to get/have.

You'll really need to track them and take many many shots.

These images are just two, out of a whole bunch of throw-aways.





Use your flash for fill, regardless of the distance between you and the subject. Also, don't worry about blowing out the sky, you may have to push your exposure up by 1 to 2 stops, as your camera's exposure meter will probably be reading the sky, and the bird will actually be underexposed.

As for the bats, about the only way you'll get any kind of image of them, is to set up your gear to capture a certain area/zone. Use a remote cord, and watch that area, when a bat enters it, hit the button. Most of the images you see from photographers getting bats, is where they have actually set up motion detectors along with multiple flash heads set to fire in multiple firings.


Mostly, it takes patience and practice. Just keep at it, and eventually, you'll get the image you really want.

Also, try not the shoot a bird from behind. Bird butt is not the most pleasing image.

lol thanks.... yes, I know bird butt is not pretty..... it's just hard to shoot anything else when he's always flying away