Bats in flight

Now the long summer evenings are here I've been experimenting (just for fun) with taking pictures of bats.

I think we can all guess a few problems with this. Random flight paths, speed of flight and low light not to mention the lack of something to focus on.

I set a high ISO and hand held to pan with the focus manually set at a pre determined distance within flash range.

This is what I got so far and it's not without post editing.....

and i thought Swifts and Swallows were hard!

Some more pictures from last nights attempt

Nikon D3100
f/4.51/200 sec
Exposure +3
ISO 3200

A difficult subject, very challenging. I'll bet you get it dialed in!

adot45 said:

A difficult subject, very challenging. I'll bet you get it dialed in!

Click to expand...

I'm still working on the ideal settings. I had the camera on shutter priority and wound up to 1/650 but the resulting images came out at 1/200. Not sure what's going on there

Could it be that enabling the pop up flash has caused the camera to slow down the shutter speed despite what I was asking it to do?

You are very brave! I guess the biggest problem is to keep them in focus.

If you use flash, the camera will reset to 1/200 or 1/250 s, depending on your settings. This is the maximum flash sync speed. You can have shorter shutter times if you use Auto FP (high-speed shutter sync) enabled flash. But if the flash is your main source of light, you don't need fast shutter speed. The flash impulse is very short, it will freeze the motion.

I think next time I'll try to set a slightly higher f number to keep the subject more in focus at varying distances within flash range. The flash was totally necessary on a critter that fast.

Impressive to attempt a difficult subject and conditions. Shot a few myself and immediately thought "no way". Since you are advancing, I will not discount attempting in the future. Thanks for starting this thread.

Very cool subject!

I should definitely try this. At dusk / night we have a TON of bats that fly around in the back yard and over our back deck. I could setup two flashes on a wireless trigger on the deck rail pointed out in to the yard and start blasting when I see them....

Hmmmm, you've got me motivated!

Not an easy subject thats for sure, I could cheat and get shots of our flying foxes heading out of an evening but there is still enough light to focus and capture the bat. I have seen micro bats around campsites and have 'tried' to photo them but not easy thats for sure.

As promised seeing as this thread has gone dead

Flying fox heading out for an evenings meal.