Bempton cliffs on the east Yorkshire Coast is an excellent RSPB nature reserve. Its great feature is that the cliffs are over 300 ft high and as a result shots can be taken of the birds at eye level. The year-long residents of the cliffs are Gannets although in summer Puffins and other seabirds congregate there. Gannets are large birds and whilst attractive, they're not particularly interesting in flight until they start to land, when their feet and wing movements are beautiful and comic at the same time.




Capturing these landing moments is pretty difficult because they fly in at high speed from the sea and at the last minute either drop down or carry on, giving the photographer only a second or two to capture the landing . With most cameras, it's very hard to do this, because by the time you recognise a landing is about to happen, you've missed it. With the latest Olympus OMD cameras however, there's a feature called Pro Capture which is specifically designed for capturing split second events. Over the course of around 3 hours. I got around 800 in-focus shots of Gannetts landing. This is a selection of around 30 of the best of those, chosen because of the beauty of their wings or the comedy of their feet (or both).




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