Every single photographer I saw and spoke to on my trip to Skomer was after a shot of a puffin coming into land; shoulders back, feet forward and wings outstretched to achieve a stable landing, and after that it was a shot of the birds in flight. As one guy said to me "the success rate is less than 0.5% but we keep on trying". He was not wrong, it is so hard to get a good shot of these birds in flight. They are small and super fast and for me it didn't help that I had the shutter speed too slow for the first few attempts. The first three shots above were shot at 1/640 sec which was clearly too slow to get a clear image, and even the last shot at 1/2000 sec is not as sharp as I would like. The problem is tracking such a small bird at speed, maintaining focus and keeping camera shake to a minimum. Perhaps the guys with gimbals on their tripods had better luck but despite the shortcomings I think that for these hand held shots I did OK.
