{"id":15308,"date":"2013-05-18T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-18T10:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=15308"},"modified":"2013-05-18T05:21:06","modified_gmt":"2013-05-18T11:21:06","slug":"flaming-gorge-osprey-an-experiment-that-worked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/18\/flaming-gorge-osprey-an-experiment-that-worked\/","title":{"rendered":"Flaming Gorge Osprey – An Experiment That Worked"},"content":{"rendered":"

We returned home\u00a0Thursday after spending three wonderful days camping\u00a0at Flaming Gorge in NE Utah.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"flaming<\/a><\/p>\n

This is very close to the view we had on most mornings from our primitive campsites (two of them), though this image was taken the morning before the Osprey photo, below.\u00a0 As you’ll see, the lighting conditions were dramatically different…<\/p>\n

We were enjoying ourselves to the point that we\u00a0considered staying a fourth day but on Thursday morning it was cloudy and raining off and on so we decided to head for home but couldn’t resist paying a pair of nesting Ospreys one last short visit before I hooked up the camping trailer and we\u00a0hit the road.\u00a0 We had\u00a0light on the birds through a crack in the clouds at the\u00a0horizon\u00a0for about 5 minutes as the sun\u00a0came up\u00a0(and\u00a0the birds were doing nothing interesting) but\u00a0immediately after that the clouds between us and the sun\u00a0were thick, dark and\u00a0constantly threatening.\u00a0\u00a0Of course one of the birds chose that particular time to become more active and fly around the area of the nest.\u00a0 Awful timing!<\/p>\n

There simply wasn’t\u00a0sufficient light to get enough shutter speed\u00a0for flight shots.\u00a0\u00a0I never shoot my Canon 7D over ISO 800 because it introduces too much digital\u00a0noise for my tastes but\u00a0the potential for interesting shots made me decide to go for broke and set my ISO at\u00a01000.\u00a0 I’d rather\u00a0have sharp shots with some noise than a\u00a0blurry\u00a0bird any day.\u00a0 But that didn’t work either because I could tell on my camera screen that the\u00a0Osprey was still\u00a0not sharp.<\/p>\n

I was frustrated and my mind was whirling, trying to come up with a way to get more shutter speed.\u00a0 I figured I’d already increased my ISO as much as I dared (especially with the dark background) and\u00a0f\/5.6 is my limit with the teleconverter\u00a0attached.\u00a0 I could remove the tc and go to f\/4 to increase my SS\u00a0but I wasn’t close enough to the nest to get the detail I wanted without using it – besides I won’t approach nesting birds closely (I was shooting from\u00a0my pickup from pavement)\u00a0and that would make\u00a0the angle too steep\u00a0anyway.\u00a0\u00a0 There had to be another way…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"osprey<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/500, f\/5.6, ISO 1000, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, noise reduction applied to background only,\u00a0not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This is the female of the pair (notice the prominent “necklace” around the neck, she is also larger than the male).\u00a0 They were incubating eggs and she had just relieved the male on the eggs.\u00a0 When the male\u00a0flew off she quickly circled the nest in flight before\u00a0coming in for\u00a0a landing to resume incubation.\u00a0 The background is a heavily shaded mountain and you can see at least one raindrop under the left wing of the bird.<\/p>\n

Not long before this shot was taken\u00a0another method of increasing shutter speed came to me – why not try deliberately underexposing the bird?\u00a0 That would\u00a0give me more\u00a0SS and make the bird in flight\u00a0sharper but then I\u00a0would have\u00a0to deal with increasing exposure in post-processing.\u00a0\u00a0This was not a natural decision for me (I’m surprised I even thought of it in all the excitement)\u00a0–\u00a0the importance of getting exposure as close to “right” in camera as possible\u00a0has been engrained in me for years because of the problems to image quality that can sometimes result when exposure is increased significantly during post-processing.<\/p>\n

So, that’s what I did and I’m happy with the results, given the conditions.\u00a0 Underexposing the image increased my shutter speed to 1\/500 sec, just enough to get the Osprey sharp as it landed (there’s some motion blur in the wing tips but I’m fine with that).<\/p>\n

I’ll be posting more\u00a0Osprey images (and a few other species)\u00a0from this trip over the next\u00a0week or two, illustrating what I thought\u00a0were\u00a0a few\u00a0of my\u00a0successes and some of the frustrations of the shooting situations I faced.\u00a0 Those frustrations can be aggravating in the extreme (at least\u00a0for my personality type…) but looking back I can see that I learned some valuable photography\u00a0lessons on this trip.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: I suspect that this post may include a little too much photography “jargon” to interest some\u00a0who may be more interested in the image than how it was created.\u00a0 But many of my readers are also bird photographers so I occasionally go this route…<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We returned home Thursday after spending three wonderful days camping at Flaming Gorge in NE Utah. This is very close to the view we had on most mornings from our campsites (two of them), though this image was taken the morning before the Osprey photo, below. As you’ll see, the lighting conditions were dramatically different…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15311,"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":[334,718],"tags":[65,68,108,398,137,500,146,187,649,222,1456,228,240,719,1458,278,282,453,1457,311],"class_list":["post-15308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-osprey-diurnal-raptors","tag-camping","tag-canon-7d","tag-digital-noise","tag-exposure","tag-female","tag-flaming-gorge","tag-flight","tag-iso","tag-low-light","tag-motion-blur","tag-necklace","tag-nest","tag-osprey","tag-pandion-haliaetus","tag-post-processing","tag-sharpness","tag-shutter-speed","tag-teleconverter","tag-underexposing","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/osprey-1356b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3YU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15308","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=15308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}