Photographers who enjoy shooting wildlife in general and birds in flight in particular will nearly always favor having more "reach" with their equipment. While out trying to capture multiple Purple Martins in flight yesterday morning, I came to the conclusion that sometimes shorter is preferable.
I frequently travel to the Ruthven Park Purple Martin colony in Cayuga, Ontario, but I've had trouble getting any decent photos.
Like many photographers, I had a propensity to want to utilize an excessively long focus length. While attempting to "fill the frame" with a subject bird is a nice idea, it is pointless if you are unable to maintain the bird in the frame for long enough to focus on it. Note that despite my best efforts, I was unable to capture much of a Purple Martin in flight on my earlier tries.
Purple Martins fly incredibly quickly and aerobatically, like other swallows, making it difficult to get photographs of them in flight. Despite the fact that their flight patterns seemed to be highly random, I decided to spend some time monitoring certain birds to see if there was any type of regularity to their motions.
On their trip back to their nesting boxes, I saw that the birds followed a few well-known paths. So I did the opposite of what I had done before. The temptation was too high and when I first started taking pictures, my CX 70-300 was fully extended. After trying in vain for 15 minutes to take some BIF images at that focal length, a light bulb eventually went out in my old brain, causing me to back off the zoom and start shooting in the 140mm-220mm focal length range.
I couldn't magnify the birds in the photo since they were obviously too small, but at least I was able to track with them for long enough to focus on them. There is a desperate need for editing the final photographs. For instance, the bulk of the images in this article that have smaller picture subjects take up between 45 and 65 percent of the sensor surface area. The good news is that I was able to finally get a couple pictures of these tiny feathered rocket ships.
I spent a few hours and ended up with maybe a dozen good pictures. It wasn't nominated for any prizes, but it was still a lot of fun.
The most crucial thing I learned that morning was to always select a focus length suitable for my degree of competence, the speed, and the size of the subjects I was photographing.
I hope this essay helped you understand a few things. Let us know what you think about it in the comments. Thanks