Nailing a “Perfect shot” is not an easy task. It can be a dedicated and long process. It actually requires a lot of patience. Scottish photographer Alan McFadyen is such a person who had that patience. He spent most of his life as a fisherman. With a nasty back injury, he moved to photography and he became a wildlife photographer in 2009. But he had to spend six years and take 720,000 photos to capture a perfect shot of a kingfisher diving into water straightly without a single splash of water.
Alan also does wildlife photography as his side business and he was inspired to love and deal with nature by his grandfather. When he was a child, his grandfather took him to visit a lake specially to watch a kingfisher nesting spot. He was completely blown away by knowing how amazing those birds are. After he entered wildlife photography, he went to the same spot to capture kingfishers and he decided to take a perfect shot of a diving kingfisher as an honor to his grandfather.
So he visited the lake several times a week and took pictures and waited for an opportunity to capture a mid-diving kingfisher. “The photo I was going to take is a flawlessly straight, perfect dive and no splash of water required. To get that not only I should be at the right place, but also the bird itself should be perfect to get such a fortunate shot” Alan said. “I would usually take around 600 photos in a session, but not a single one of them was good to me. However, when I look back at thousands of photos I have taken to capture this shot, it just realizes me how much work I have done so far to get it” he furthermore said.
The common kingfisher is famous for its bright plumage that is atypical for a bird living in a cold climate. This bird usually lives near bodies of water. From the above images, you can see the beauty of the bird itself and the diving.
