While I was capturing some images of cormorants at Hamilton harbour I was fortunate to get some decent images of them taking off from the surface of the water.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

This behaviour is often difficult to capture during most of the season but early on when the birds are busy repairing and building their nests their behaviour is more predictable.

To identify cormorants that were likely to take off from the water I would look for individual birds that had found a twig or other nest building material and were holding it in their beaks while floating on the water.

I would pre-focus my Nikon 1 V2 on the subject bird, using AF-C with subject tracking and using 15 fps. Then I would wait for a few seconds until the bird exhibited some sign of impatience, then fire off an AF-C burst. Since the birds are quite dark I used centre-weighted average metering.

The cormorants almost explode from the water when they begin the process of taking off so the timing of an AF-C burst is critical. As you can see in the image above, cormorants use a double-leg pump action to help them become airborne. Other water birds like geese tend to exhibit a walking motion over the surface of the water.

To get good framing with your images it is important to allow for wing movement and the splashes caused by the double-leg pumping motions of the birds.  I used Manual settings with my Nikon 1 V2 along with Auto-ISO160-3200.

Using the fastest AF-C setting that your camera allows will help capture interesting combinations of wing and leg positions, along with splashes behind the birds.

If you camera has a decent buffer you can hold your AF-C burst as the birds become airborne and capture some nice bird-in-flight images in the same AF-C run.

I found that my Nikon 1 V2 did a great job holding focus and I was able to get numerous ‘keeper’ images even though I was only at the harbour for about 2 hours.

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