Photographing Alcedo athis in action

More than a year ago, this odyssey began ... The idea was to capture images of an action that takes place at an incredible speed, the high speed of the capture of fish by a king fisher. This type of photography required both an exhaustive knowledge of the behavior of the bird and technical knowledge to be able to freeze an image at such speed ... so with the help of a partner we put our hands to the work The first thing was to locate a king fisher, this we already had. The second thing to know where it was going to be, with more probability, in order to prefocus the area where the bird's entrance would take place, since the depth of field is something essential to take into account, in our case it ranged between 5 and 15 cm, where the image would come to focus The third handicap to solve was to freeze the image, so we tried both possible technics with high speeds, which did not give good results because we had to increase the ISO a lot to be able to pull speeds close to 1/5000, which still did not give us the freezing of the subject as we were looking for. On the other hand, and in this case it was the method that we used, it was freeze the image with flashes, that is, the only light captured by the camera should come from the light provided by the flashes, this allowed us to freeze the action , although the majority of the flashes usually fail at some point in the burst of shots , leaving images where one of the flashes failed :( Once we were clear about where we would take the photograph and what methodology to use, we set to it. A total of five flashes were placed in the area, two and two just where the action would take place, and another flash to illuminate the background. With the help of remote triggers we could handle the camera shot at a distance from where we could anticipate the action, in a simpler way than looking through the viewfinder .... The result of one moment of the sessions is above (video one of them) and below (some of the images), although the portfolio created with this species, and its fishing behavior, well deserved the effort, I hope you like it!

Obviously, there are many more details (essential to make this picture) that by extension or complexity I have omitted in this description, however I will be happy to share them with all of you in an action photography workshop with a King fisher