My daughter nicknamed these nuthatches 'the five second birds', because that's just about how long they remain on my deck. The time that it takes them to land, grab their bird seed, and then take off again is about... five seconds.
Since these birds are so prone to immediately take to flight, I decided that it might be a good opportunity to try to make a picture of a bird in flight.
To get anything resembling a non-blurry wing shot, I bumped up my ISOs into ridiculously high ranges (for experimentation purposes). This particular image was shot at ISO-3200, an exposure time of 1/1250 sec. While the higher ISO does allow for a quicker picture (where you can actually make out the wings and not simply a blur of motion), the sacrifice is that you get a very grainy picture. I tried to clean this up a little bit in AfterShot Pro, but... it's still grainy. Converting the image to black and white (in Photomatix) seems to have helped mask some of it.
It's an experiment, fun to try with more to figure out. It really does give you respect for those photographers who are able capture such movements without the blur or the noise in a crisp, clean shot.
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