A few days ago I visited Hamilton harbour to capture some images of cormorant nesting behaviour.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

It was a nice, sunny morning with the sun at my back which allowed for decent exposures of the various birds flying to their nests.

Since it is early in the season the cormorants are busy repairing and building their nests, creating an abundance of opportunities to capture images of birds in flight.

To try to capture as many potentially usable images as possible I shot hand-held using AF-C with subject tracking at 15 fps. My Nikon 1 V2 held focus very well as you can see from the next four images captured with the same AF-C burst.

There were so many good image opportunities that I filled several 16 GB cards during my two hour visit to the harbour. Here are more examples of images taken from the same AF-C burst shot at 15 fps, using subject tracking.

There were also ample opportunities to capture cormorants in flight while carrying nesting materials.

Even though I’ve captured thousands of images of cormorants over the past several years I always find spending time at Hamilton harbour during their nesting season to be an enjoyable way to practice my bird-in-flight hand-holding technique.

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