{"id":145815,"date":"2023-11-01T06:12:20","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T12:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=145815"},"modified":"2023-11-02T06:59:52","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T12:59:52","slug":"two-mallards-tandem-takeoff-in-alternate-styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/01\/two-mallards-tandem-takeoff-in-alternate-styles\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Mallards – Tandem Takeoff In Alternate Styles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hunters at Bear River MBR have made ducks jumpy as hell so yesterday I decided to try to take advantage of the situation.<\/p>\n

Duck takeoffs are fun and rewarding to capture but hard to photograph well. For most of the year, if you can get one in your viewfinder, you don’t know if or when it’ll take off so it’s a waiting game that the photographer usually loses. Either they don’t take off at all, or they take off before you’re in position and ready, or they wait so long to take off the photographer loses the edge – the intense concentration required to capture them at blastoff. When it happens it just happens too fast.<\/p>\n

But yesterday, thanks to the hunters, I noticed a predictable pattern. They were so jumpy they were consistently taking off within a second or so, before or after, my pickup rolled very slowly to a complete stop. So I started getting them in my viewfinder even before I was completely stopped and they typically took off right about then.<\/span><\/p>\n

And my strategy actually worked, quite a few times in fact. This is one of them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

These two female mallards were so jumpy they took off while my pickup was still barely inching forward. This is the first shot I got – I didn’t even get any photos of them on the water. I like the photo because of the explosive takeoff of both birds, because both birds are sharp and because of their dramatically different takeoff styles – the hen on the left is taking off straight up while her companion is taking off forward at about a 45\u00b0 angle.<\/p>\n

I was pretty close, so I was lucky to keep both of them in the frame. If I had more room above and to the right I’d crop the shot differently, but I don’t.<\/p>\n

Less than ideal composition or not, the photo still makes me smile. To me, the hen on the left looks like she’s about to hit her head on the top of the frame.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Hunters at Bear River MBR have made ducks jumpy as hell so yesterday I decided to try to take advantage of the situation.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145835,"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":[338,6,334,1172],"tags":[49,1940,916,7207,146,872,311],"class_list":["post-145815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-mallard-waterfowl","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-bird-photography-technique","tag-composition","tag-female-mallards-taking-off","tag-flight","tag-hunters","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mallard-3159-cropped-to-one-bird-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-BVR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145815","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=145815"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145942,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145815\/revisions\/145942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}