Misty Exchange

D4
600mm = 1.4TC
1/500
ISO 1600
F/7.1
Metering Center Weighted Avg.
Exposure Manual
White Balance Manual Cloudy
Cropped 84% (Started with 16.163 mb cropped down to 2.548mb)
Tripod with Wimberly head
Image taken June 9th

This image is one of the 4 juvi kites that had fledged their nest on May 28th. See last image posted for reference. This image was taken June 9th, only 12 days later. It's amazing how quickly they learn to fly....going from scared straight to fantastic aerial maneuvers with in days. This is not the first day they were exchanging food in mid air but it was the first day that they came close enough for me to get some quick shots. Getting an exchange has a lot to do with blind luck (being in the right place at the right time) but also if you put in the time to observe behavior patterns you can get pretty close to the location where they TEND to do exchanges and that's what I did. I have been fortunate enough to get many, many food exchange images this year, but what I didn't have was one with a background other than sky. So I pre-planned for several days by observing the feeding habits of this group, noting where they were most likely to hunt, what time of day, how far the juvi's would tend to go chase after dad with the food, etc. and I needed a mountain in the background, because the exchanges happen fairly high in the air, and I needed the light behind me and the wind at my back so the kites would be facing me. No butt shots.
I got myself all excited with a plan in mind, woke up early in the morning to drive to the lake, positioned myself for the shot on the side of a very steep hill, shooting down into the area where I felt an exchange would take place. But when I got to the lake it was almost completely fogged in (typical for the time of year and the time of day) and there was virtually no light. So, this image was taken early in the morning at high ISO, with low shutter speed, and lots of mist in the air. To make matters worse, this image is a huge crop (85%). I am learning more and more about my new cameras abilities with very poor low light and I keep coming away completely amazed. I also had my D300s with me ( in case I needed to fire off some far away shots..it has a crop factor of 1.5)and could not get a clean shot even at a relatively low ISO of 400 with all the water vapor in the air. At that low ISO there was virtually no shutter speed at all so I hoped that the exchange would happen close to me.
All in all, I'm ok with this image (there were 7 images taken....it happened really quickly, less than a second) even though there is lots of wing blur and a loss of detail from the huge crop. It will definitely be a goal for me next year to get some better background images of exchanges but for now this will have to do. Larger version for a better look see. Thanks for looking and sorry for the book you had to read.