A roller in action

This is a lilac-breasted roller, one of the most beautiful birds in Africa. On my first two trips to Kenya in '94 and '95, I was never able to get a sharp picture of these guys with my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67. The rollers were just too fast. When I went digital in 2005 with fast autofocus, I was finally able to take sharp pictures of birds in flight. This picture represents the first time I was able to capture these colorful birds on the hunt. But they are so fast that I didn't even realized I'd captured a lizard in the beak until I saw it on the LCD screen. I cropped this image about 40% and then used Topaz sharpen in post-processing. I used a Canon 500mm f/4, and the settings were 1/3200, f/5.6, and 800 ISO.