Having enjoyed some good opportunities with Kingfishers at Tawharanui we ended our day with Whangateau Kingfishers. If the timing of the tide is suitable there is the opportunity to sit at the edge of the estuary while the Kingfishers hunt the flats for crabs from their perches in the trees. The last rays of the setting sun provide lovely warm frontal lighting.

It is simply a matter of waiting for a bird to fly down, lock focus and hopefully capture something interesting. Being rapid flyers this can be a challenge and rapidly changing backgrounds can spoil an otherwise good image. Water reflecting blue sky as in the first 2 images is nice but can be disrupted by emerging sandbars or moored boats. Equally a distant land/vegetation background in the next images can work with the green/buff tones on the bird but can also be disrupted by brighter areas that distract the eye and ruin the image.

This can make editing initially quite quick with plenty of useless images easily deleted. With luck a few will work with sharp focus, acceptable pose and clean background. This set of 4 images probably came from 30 minutes so not too bad a yield.

This is again a situation where the Nikon group area AF works well to lock onto the closest subject. Photos with Nikon D850 and Nikon 500mm f5.6PF lens using my preferred Nikon AF focus setup.