2016—Taking Flight

As with my Costa Rica photographs, I’m still reviewing the photographs I took in St. Augustine, Florida last month.  Most of the shots were of the gorgeous great egrets with their elegant mating rituals and stunning plumage.  Here are a couple of shots of one of the egrets just at the moment of take off.  I took these with the 600mm lens (which I used on all of the shots in St. Augustine) without an extender and without using DX mode and without cropping.  I was lucky to keep the bird in focus as I panned (at least for two frames) and completely in the frame for two frames.   None of the other photographs in this sequence contains an entire bird.