Eyes left

Taken on Skomer Island in West Wales, Uk.
These birds fly like bullets and just getting a shot of one in full flight is an achievement and if you get one that is anywhere near sharp then that's a bonus.

Well, that was the case with this camera and lens but I've recently bought a Nikon D3 and have been practising down my local beach with seagulls over the Christmas break with my Nikon 70-200 f2.8 attached and I was amazed how much easier it now is to get sharp flight shots, almost every single shot was sharp and I didn't even have the full 51 focus points active, nor did I have 3D tracking on, just continuous focus.
I almost feel like I'm cheating now, compared to what I had to do before to get my shots, this camera does it all for me now.

This image was taken as a single shot, I had no choice with a 2,5 frames per second frame rate and just the one central cross hair for focussing, I had just the one chance per fly past as by the time the shutter fired for the second time the bird was gone so as you can imagine my success rate was very low but the sense of achievement when I did get one was high.

This has been cropped a bit,Um, I mean I used some digital zoom lol, the bird was central in the original capture.

Happy New Year everyone.

Sony A350
Sigma 50-500 EX
1/640th
f7.1
ISO 100
280mm
-0.7 stop exposure compensation
Centre-weighted metering
Hand held