This is a grainy photo of an exceptional subject: a common nighthawk twisting in mid-air to capture an insect. The light conditions were poor; photographer Tig Tillinghast was only able to get the shot by panning his camera to match the bird’s movement, which allowed for a longer shutter speed without creating motion blur. “Because nighthawks come out at dusk,” he explained, “it can be difficult to create an exposure with enough light when you also need to keep a short shutter speed to freeze the action.”
This picture was taken approximately 220 yards from the bird, from the vantage point of the top of the Union Village Dam in Thetford, Vermont. The image was shot with a Sony A9 body using a 600mm F/4 lens along with a 1.4x teleconverter, making for an equivalent focal length of 840mm. Even with that high magnification, the picture had to be heavily cropped (if the original picture were a chess board, the area that the bird occupies would be a single square). Aperture was set to f/5.6, and the shutter speed was set to a 1/1250th of a second. The ISO was set to 5,000.