Flock of Skylarks

One of the things that amazes me about modern compact cameras is that the high end camers can compete and even surpass the frame rate of SLRs, all of which should make them ideal for action photography. The downside, at least from the point of view of my compact, the Sony RX100 is that the maximum zoom is more limited and worse still I have to compose my shots with the LCD screen on the back of the camera. In continuous mode with high speed drive, the autofocus is amazing good at tracking remarkably small objects against a clear sky even if you cannot get them to your central tracking spot. However, against a more cluttered background such as a beach this ability disappears completely.

All of which is a prologue to what I was attempting today. I was sitting among the dunes at the edge of Barns Ness beach and there was a flock ( Is this the right collective noun ? ) of skylarks swooping up and down the beach. Having set my camera to the appropriate modes, I was attempting to follow them with my camera though this was impossible to guage accurately as it is almost impossible to see these tiny birds on a LCD screen looking up into a bright sky, so my aim was very much more by luck than judgement.

However, I was delighted when I returned home to find that I had a number of images where the birds were sharp enough to reproduce. There was the usual problem of photographing birds against a bright sky in that the birds were underexposed or the sky over exposed so I had to select the birds very carefully in order to adjust their exposure. However, this, though painstaking, was useful as it then enabled me to copy and paste a couple of the birds onto an original image so that I could have at least have the effect of the flock rather than a single tiny bird on a bland sky.

Having rambled on in the past about aiming to get a SBIF (small bird in flight) image I am going to claim this as my first.

SOS Can anybody help. There seems to be a misidentification here as pointed out by PaulineW. She thought they were Shore Larks. Having consulted the Collins Guide and the net I think they are more likely to be sand martins. Can anybody throw any more light on this ? This is what I really like about Blipfoto. At times it becomes more of a group effort and the whole is definitely better than the sum of its parts.