[It] is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not
done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Samuel Johnson, 1771
Which is more or less how I felt about my sequence, below, showing a kingfisher landing on a piling: it is not that the picture is done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all.
Pictures of the this bird sitting still and fishing are found at kingfishers on the Kootenay Lake website.
Here is the problem: I see a Belted Kingfisher only every few months, and then only for a few minutes. The bird quickly decides that the local fishing is inadequate and it moves away. So, if capturing a scene of it sitting is iffy (see the link in the box), recording its arrival is more of a trick—especially for a hand-held shot of a small bird some 80 metres distant.
The spacing between images decreases as the bird climbs toward the top of the piling. It is decelerating by using gravity to bring itself to a stop at just the right point. Incidentally, the white flecks in the picture are from a light snowfall.
