Photo of the Week 2016-10-31

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !

Halloween Bat

Appropriately, for this time of year, I had an encounter with a bat while on an early evening walk along the cottage road with Murphy. It was still fairly light out and at first I thought it was a small bird, perhaps a chickadee but it's flight was quite erratic. When I got a closer look, I was surprised to find it was a bat. I've only encountered them later in the evening, when the light has almost disappeared, they come out to feed on the flying bugs.

I hurried back to the cottage to drop Murph off, get a camera and telephoto lens, and get back to see if I could get some shots. Well let me tell you, the little guy may not have been that fast but with the flight pattern zigging and zagging all over the place it was one of the most difficult subjects I've yet tried to photograph.

There wasn't much light left for photography, let alone something using a high shutter speed to freeze the motion. I turned up the ISO to 6400 on the 7DII and started trying to track the bat in flight with the 70-300 L I had mounted. While I managed to get a few images nearly in focus, there were far more with a blurry bat or no bat at all. I tried zooming out and getting the bat in frame, locking focus tracking on it, then zooming in as it flew towards me but it was far too erratic. I ended up setting focus to about 3m, setting the zoom to 70mm, ISO 6400, f/4 @ 1/1250 s shutter speed and waiting until the bat came around for another circuit over and around my head. When I thought it was within 3m, I just pointed the lens at it without looking through the viewfinder and sprayed away at 10 frames a second (thank you 7DII) until the buffer was full. I did this several times and managed a couple of images where you could identify the subject as a bat. The lead image is one of the better ones, cropped significantly to approx 20% of the original frame and processed for Halloween. Here is the original ...

DJE