What can you do with a whole bunch of images from a burst?

I enjoy trying to photograph birds in flight, and I thoroughly enjoy free-flight bird shows, like the Spirits in the Sky show at Healesville Sanctuary. It’s good practice for photographing different kinds of birds, and for tracking them in flight. I have to make sure I put at least one fresh memory card in my camera before the show starts, because it encourages shooting at 20fps, and that is an easy way to fill a card.

I get home, and I have long sequences of birds in flight. I’ve shown a few here, but they are not the most exciting sights, because a bird doesn’t move a long way in 1/20 of a second. The obvious question arises: what can you do with leftover images? (does that sound like the intro to a craft segment in a home show?)

A few people have said: “you should make a movie of these images”. I wasn’t convinced, but then I thought: “What about an animated GIF?”

The image below is an animated GIF of Magra the wedge-tailed eagle swooping in to grab a piece of meat on the grass. Her starting point was high on a dead tree - the headline image above shows her just before she started this flight. The GIF shows 62 images in a sequence shot at 20fps, so it’s just over 3 seconds of flight. I processed the original images into JPEGs 1500x1000 pixels, and the animated GIF still came out at 50MB, so please be patient with how long it takes to load.

All of these images were shot with the Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 GM II, at f/2.8, 1/2000 in bright sun on a near cloudless day. ISO was on auto, and started at ISO 400 up in the tree, dropping to 320, then 200, 160, and eventually to 125 for the final shot. The images in the sequence are not cropped, but the headline image was cropped to a square.

I created this GIF using Adobe Photoshop, but you do not have to use Photoshop. It’s just the tool I use most often, and it has good support for making animated GIFs. I won’t go into all the details on making the animated GIF here (please post a comment if you want me to write up the whole process using Photoshop), but in short, the steps were:

1. shoot the burst of images (I recommend using the A1 for this, naturally. You may want to use a different camera)
2. convert the entire burst into JPEGs of a reasonable size (I used Adobe Bridge driving PhotoShop in Image Processor mode, and I made my RAW files into JPEGs 1500x1000)
3. load those JPEGs into a new image in Photoshop as layers (using Load Files into Stack)
4. create a timeline
5. turn each layer into a frame in the timeline
6. export it as an animated GIF

There are some good tutorials online covering the creation of animated GIF (steps 3 onwards above), but they all presume you already have the images.