Kingfishers
I've wanted to photograph kingfishers for a long time. Scoping out your own site requires a huge amount of effort, a friendly land owner and essentially time. The latter I don't currently have. Thankfully, there are places where hides have already been set up and the kingfishers can be relied upon to show up (most of the time), but they are completely wild birds.
It was a blustery day causing the feathers of these fabulous birds to get ruffled.
The kings dive at an incredible speed. Even at 11 frames per second I was lucky to catch a couple of the dive.
The eruption out of the water is over in a second but high shutter speeds reveal the incredible power required to get back into the air
The spray of water droplets adds a magical quality
Late afternoon light and the perfect pose showing off its electric blue back