Week 4 - Chickadees in flight

This week I experimented with capturing some small backyard birds in flight. Trying to track small finches, chickadees, sparrows and other small birds with a long telephoto is amazingly tough. Larger birds like geese, eagles, and ospreys are somewhat predictable and can be tracked for a relatively long time. Little backyard birds tend to flit around and go very short distances when feeding. I noticed that chickadees would land on one of the feeder arms before proceeding to the feeder. These photos were taken by pre-focusing on the feeder arm. I did a "spray and pray" technique as I saw a bird heading to the feeder. Even at 10 frames per second there were a lot of misses.

Obviously these shots are a bit soft and noisy. It was late in the day with a heavy overcast so I had to push the ISO to 3200. I'll try this again on a brighter day so I can go with a lower ISO and an aperture setting with more depth of field.