Black Kite – ‘Got you my precious’

Taken at the excellent Hawk Conservancy Trust, in Andover, Hampshire, UK. The finale at the 2pm session at the Trust, is an arial display, in which pieces of chcken are first thrown in the air, and then catapulted up. The Kites fly vertically upward, and jostle and barge each other out of the way to get the tasty morsels. They use their talons to hold and eat the prey, and are surprisingly mammal-like in the way they reach out and hold the flying chicken bits. The high speed and unpredicatable motion of the Kites makes this a real test of both technique and technology. This was a series in which I was testing the Sony A9 camera, generally acknowledged by web pundits to be the best bird in flight camera in the world, against the Olympus E-M1x, generally regarded by web pundits as a useless anachronism and part of a failed company and camera system. See if you can tell which is which, and see which camera took your favorite photograph.......