This photograph was taken by Scottish wildlife photographer Alan McFadyen after a 6-year pursuit of the perfect kingfisher dive.
McFadyen first became fascinated by kingfishers as a child while watching them with his grandfather near the River Tarff in Scotland. Years later, after taking up wildlife photography, he returned to the same area with one very specific image in mind: a kingfisher diving perfectly straight into the water, with its reflection creating an almost symmetrical image.
Getting that exact moment was extremely difficult. Kingfishers dive incredibly fast, and the timing had to be almost perfect. McFadyen spent around 4,200 hours photographing them and took approximately 720,000 exposures during the process.
He sometimes took around 600 photos in a single session without getting the shot he wanted.
Eventually, after six years, everything lined up perfectly and he captured the image above, with the kingfisher's beak just reaching the water and its reflection forming the other half of the composition.
What makes the story even more meaningful is that the location was the same place where he had watched kingfishers with his grandfather as a child.
I've been doing bird photography for two years, and belted kingfishers are my favorite. I've only seen them about 3 times, and never got close to getting a diving shot like this, as they just fly away right away basically. This one is a common kingfisher
The photographer used a shutter speed of 1/5000th of a second. A normal video camera can run up to 60 frames per second. More expensive video cams might go up to 240fps. Much too slow to capture a single frame of a diving bird without severe blurring.
Kingfishers dive at about 40km/h, so at 60fps, they'd have moved a body length (~20cm) every frame. Very hard. Even with 1/5000th of a second per "frame" that's 2mm per "frame" if it was a video camera.
This is likely shot in bursts, so sort of what you mean already. Depending on the shutter speed it can even have higher “frame rate” than a typical video.
It would have probably helped, I’m not sure if even the amazing AF of the A9 would be good enough for this and you might still have to prefocus, but at minimum a more modern camera like the A9 has double the burst rate of the D4, which would give you twice the chances of catching the exact frame you want.
With Most cameras when you shoot video, even at 4k, the indavidual frames are much lower quality compared to indavidual stills. Color deapth and resolution are reduced, compression happens, and several other settings are changed so that things look good in motion because its a video.
But most photographers will shoot things like this with a setting called burst mode, where the camera will take several still pictures super fast, which the photographer can pick and choose which ones to save from. How many depends on the camera, but most good cameras will do anywhere from 3-10 per second, so thats kind of like taking a video. If he actually took 700k+ images then he was definitely using burst mode.
It probably took him so long though because these birds dive into the water at very fast speeds, so getting it the instant it touches the water would be very difficult. On top of the fact the water is perfectly still, the lighting is the way he wants it, etc.
He probably got 1000 photos that to normal people looking at them on a phone screen look exactly like this. But to trained photographers werent good enough.
downvote lol i dont care. are you guys really thinking it is not possible to create a bird with AI? i did it on my phone in 1min. with some blackbox AI. effort is 2hours to create a perfect image with perfect water reflections with custom open source models. 1hour for custom model training and 1hour creating. you will not see a difference to real fotos.
"Lol, I made some AI slop with fake colors in 19 seconds! It looks like a kingfisher if you've never seen one!"
So... You didn't have the original idea. You copied it at a fraction of the effort... And you've not actually produced anything with any value at all, unlike the OP.
I was wondering the same thing, interestingly though an AI model is most likely already trained on these images so it's a chicken and egg problem. Try create an image you know doesn't exist and see how it goes ....
nice foto and crazy effort in a time when you can create this with AI in 1min
Yes why fucking bother with artistic expression when we can just ask a data centre to generate a fake image that steals from the effort of images like this?
Better yet, why don't we just replace you with a bot account?
Why bother with real animals when AI bullshit is so much more colorful and pretty?! What a kingfisher actually looks like is totally irrelevant to "photographs" of them, right?
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u/jacspe 6h ago
Id be pissed i cropped the reflection.
Send it, again.
Thus is the life of a wildlife photog