Photographing diving kingfishers at 1/10th of a second combined with high-speed flash was, as it sounds, not straightforward. The easy part is the hide and perch setup, which is superb thanks to the years of development by Tom Robinson, who runs Wildlife Photography Hides. The day starts with an early 07:00 meeting with Tom for an introduction to the well-appointed hide followed by an hour in which Tom explains the concept behind the technique and provides initial exposure settings to get you going.
On the day of my visit, the morning dawned with dark skies and heavy rain, but that did not put the kingfishers off. They were flitting around the perch before first light. The first challenge is getting your reactions up to speed. While the flash recycle time allows you to fire off multiple shots before you get dark images, which didn't happen in my session, at 1/10th of a second you only get one shutter actuation to catch the kingfisher dive. After that, the next four or five frames catch the splash, and the bird returns to the air. Consequently, it's easy to miss the shot, especially when the bird's been perched for several minutes and your focus begins to wander.
My second challenge was the changing light as the heavily overcast conditions gave way to broken winter sunshine. While the diving perch is protected from direct light, the changing ambient light requires a slight adjustment of your exposure and flash power, which I got wrong for a while. Frustratingly you only find out you've got it wrong once a bird has dived and you can check how it was exposed. However, a call to Tom got me back on the right path.
Thankfully, the kingfishers were super busy and hungry all day, so I had lots of opportunities to catch a dive. Even so, you are somewhat at the mercy of the kingfisher as to what shape and orientation you capture. That said, I still ended up with several images I was happy with, but I think I'd do better on another visit as hopefully, I'd not make the exposure mistakes again. One technical frustration I had was that there seems to be a slight issue with Canon R cameras and second curtain sync. Instead of the flash freezing the bird at the end of the motion trail, the blur extends slightly in front of the flash exposure.
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