{"id":134105,"date":"2023-04-18T06:16:49","date_gmt":"2023-04-18T12:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=134105"},"modified":"2023-04-18T12:26:55","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T18:26:55","slug":"great-blue-heron-flying-low-toward-a-creek-a-long-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/18\/great-blue-heron-flying-low-toward-a-creek-a-long-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Blue Heron Flying Low Toward A Creek – A Long Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

A marathon of Great Blue Heron flight shots. 19 of them.<\/p>\n

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Four days ago I found this Great Blue Heron above a creek bed at Farmington Bay WMA. I took a few shots of ‘him’ where he was but in this habitat a few is all I need. At first he wasn’t doing much so for a while the two of us just sat there and stared at each other.<\/p>\n

My best chance for more interesting photos of him was flight shots but I was so close to him I knew I’d have to be incredibly lucky to keep him completely in frame with his huge wings flailing, much less get compositions I like. In bird photography you have to play the cards you’re dealt so I waited a while to see what might happen.<\/p>\n

I ended up being luckier than I had any right to expect. When he took off I kept him in frame and in focus for 19 photos and I’m going to include every last one of them in today’s post, which I believe is a new record for Feathered Photography. 19 photos is almost certainly overkill but when I tried to whittle the number down I couldn’t decide which ones to omit, so you get’em all.<\/p>\n

I may not have clipped or cut off any body parts in these photos but in many of them he was too close to one or more of the frame edges, resulting in wonky compositions. They are what they are.<\/p>\n

OK, let’s get on with it. I’ll keep my narration to a minimum.<\/p>\n

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He squawked three times and then…<\/p>\n

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began to take off.<\/p>\n

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Dang, that’s a lot of wingspan to try to keep in frame from this close distance.<\/p>\n

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That’s better. And a little easier.<\/p>\n

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His intended destination was the bottom of the creek bed perhaps 75 yards away so…<\/p>\n

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he was always flying slightly downhill.<\/p>\n

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Prehistoric-looking birds, aren’t they.<\/p>\n

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At times he was tipped so far forward I thought he might go ass over teakettle but…<\/p>\n

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he didn’t, not quite.<\/p>\n

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In this shot he was too close to two frame edges and then…<\/p>\n

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it got even worse. No body parts clipped though.<\/p>\n

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More of almost the same so I’ll shut up for a few frames.<\/p>\n

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Finally, he’s nearly over the creek that we can’t see, as evidenced by….<\/p>\n

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the short grasses in the background beginning to green up a little.<\/p>\n

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That’s it, we’re done. After this shot he began to turn away from me and I began to lose focus on him because of tall dried grasses on this side of the creek that were in front of him.<\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised by three things in this series.<\/p>\n

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  1. That I kept him completely in frame for so many photos with me being so close to him.<\/li>\n
  2. When it works, it doesn’t always – not by a long shot, I’m amazed by the ability of the Canon R5 to keep the bird in focus. I’ll take some of the credit but I couldn’t have done it without Canon’s animal\/eye detection.<\/li>\n
  3. How much depth of field I got. For nearly every one of these shots the entire huge bird, from wingtip to wingtip and bill tip to toe tip, is sharp or nearly so. With me being so close I’m at a loss for words to explain how that happened. But I’ll take it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Once again, apologies for such a long post. Tomorow’s edition of Feathered Photography will be shorter. By magnitudes.<\/p>\n

    Ron<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A marathon of Great Blue Heron flight shots. 19 of them.<\/p>\n

    Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,2782,1094],"tags":[1095,6860,6214,6859,105,146,712,2738,311],"class_list":["post-134105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-great-blue-herons","tag-ardea-herodias","tag-ass-over-teakettle","tag-canon-r5","tag-canons-animal-eye-detection","tag-depth-of-field","tag-flight","tag-great-blue-heron","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/great-blue-heron-7556-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ySZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134105"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134271,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134105\/revisions\/134271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}