Earlier this week, during a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens, I was very fortunate to be able to capture a selection of photographs of a Golden Crowned Kinglet. These small, insect eating birds are difficult to photograph as they are constantly on the move as they dart from branch to branch looking for food.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

This particular bird didn’t stay still for more than 2-3 seconds before it would dart off, jump, or drop down to another branch. Suffice to say I missed a lot of photographs just trying to keep up with this little speed demon.

It was a challenge from an eye/hand coordination perspective to find this tiny bird in my viewfinder when shooting at an equivalent-field-of-view of 1120 mm. I had to stop a few times to see where the Golden Crowned Kinglet had landed.

A couple of times I shortened the focal length of my M.Zuiko 100-400 mm f/5-6.3 IS zoom to make it a bit easier to locate my subject bird. Most of the time I kept my lens fully extended to take advantage of the reach.

I captured all of the photographs in this article using Pro Capture H with my standard settings of 15 Pre-Shutter Frames and my Frame Limiter also set to 15. I used a frame rate of 60 frames per second, as well as single point auto-focus.

As regular readers know, I love to challenge myself and my camera gear. This Golden Crowned Kinglet certainly supplied that in spades!

Without the use of Pro Capture H I would not have been able to capture a great many images in this article of the Golden Crowned Kinglet on the move.

The Golden Crowned Kinglet stayed around a few trees in my immediate area for about 11 minutes, then disappeared. I was very thankful to spend this amount of time photographing this remarkable little bird. Often these kinds of opportunities are much more fleeting and only last for a minute or two.

Here is a series of 4 consecutive images of the Golden Crowned Kinglet taking flight.

Working extremely quickly I was able to capture a decent selection of photographs of the Golden Crowned Kinglet in flight as you can see from the following images. My shooting angle was far from ideal in many of the images, but I was still thrilled to capture them.

As stated in many of my previous articles, every photographer should buy and use the camera gear that best meets their needs. A more skilled photographer than I was with full frame could have been able to capture some good images of this Golden Crowned Kinglet using a larger sensor camera. For me, most of these images would have been impossible without using Pro Capture H and my Olympus gear.

Getting my shot is ultimately the only thing that is critically important to me. I need to know that I can count on my camera gear regardless of the conditions I may face. After more than two years of using my E-M1X I have absolutely no regrets.

Usually my favourite bird image from a photo session is an in-flight photograph. In this case it was the image above of a perched Golden Crowned Kinglet.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. Images were produced from RAW files using my standard process. Crops are noted as appropriate. This is the 1,071st article published on this website since its original inception.

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