I sort of don’t know where to begin. This picture is just world class. The structure of the feathers and the shape of the wings is just amazing. (Bob used an extremely fast shutter speed to freeze all of this action, probably something like 1/2000 of a second. That’s so short (fast) that even Bob was amazed when he saw this show up on his camera.

 

I have to digress for a moment. I’ve always been a little nutty for the Wright Brothers — from the time I read a written for kids biography of them in the fifth grade, written by Quentin Reynolds, by the way.

 

Anyway there was a time when Wilbur Wright spent several months alone on the sand dunes in North Carolina studying the flight of birds. He just sat there and watched birds fly and essentially figured out how to do it. He wrote a book about the basics of flight which is considered a classic and is still tght at the Air Force Academy. This story is told in the great biography of the Wright Brothers by David McCullough. It’s a short book and super interesting.

 

Whenever I see photographs of flying birds that look this good I always think of how many weeks or months Wilbur could have taken off the process if he just had a camera.

Anyway, you’re in good company here, Robert. Fantastic work. The Wright Brothers would have worshipped this image. Can you imagine?