This article features a selection of recent handheld images of gulls landing on snow along the shoreline of Forty Mile Creek Park.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

I hadn’t used my M.Zuiko 150-600 mm f/5-6.3 IS for over a couple of months, and soon discovered that my skill set really needed a tune-up to be able to use this lens effectively.

After using my wife’s M.Zuiko 75-300 mm f/4.8-6.7 II for a number of practice sessions, and while on our extended New Zealand photography tour, my eye/hand coordination had eroded for longer focal lengths.

I found that I was floundering a little bit trying to photograph gulls landing on snow, so I did some basic practice shots of gulls in-flight.

This helped with my eye/hand coordination and shutter release timing.

I also did some practice images getting in very tight on gulls as they were banking… as this type of maneuver is quite common when birds are coming in to land.

Photographing birds-in-flight, and especially those coming in to land in amongst other birds, can be a tricky proposition.

It is important to acquire focus at the right time, then locking it in prior to a gull getting in too tight to other birds.

This helps to reduce the risk that a camera’s auto focusing will jump to other birds.

As regular readers know I always try to use a single, small auto-focus point for all of my photography. I find this gives me more control over my camera.

My preferred approach with birds-in-flight is to use a combination of Pro Capture L and Bird Recognition AI Subject Tracking.

For me, this is a multi-sensory experience. Visually I need to pay attention to the white subject box as Bird Recognition AI identifies a subject bird.

Then after half depressing my shutter release… wait for that box to turn green when the camera has acquired focus on it.

Finally, I wait for the auditory beep from my E-M1X to confirm that focus has been achieved in Pro Capture L.

The green box adjusts in size as my E-M1X fine tunes its auto-focusing on a subject bird. Throughout this process the precise use of touch is required in terms of adjusting lens focal length, and the use of a camera’s shutter release.

I typically refresh this process a few times as a distant bird-in-flight approaches. As various parts of this auto focus process are playing out, it is also important for me to stay aware of how the incoming gull landing on snow is being framed in my viewfinder.

As humans we sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that we can multi-task. The reality is that we can’t. What we actually do is rapidly shift our mental attention from one task to another.

The more rapidly we can make these mental shifts in our attention, the more successful we tend to be photographing moving subjects like gulls landing on snow.

It took me some time to get back in the groove with my M.Zuiko 150-600 in terms of my eye/hand coordination, subject framing, and shutter release timing. Like riding a bicycle… all those things did eventually align and made for a successful photography session.

It became very apparent to me that I needed to do a much more intensive practice session to get my in-field skills to where they needed to be with my M.Zuiko 150-600. More on that in an upcoming article.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld using camera equipment  noted in the EXIF data. All images were created from RAW files using my standard process in post. This is the 1,435 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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