{"id":15350,"date":"2013-05-19T04:00:11","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=15350"},"modified":"2013-05-18T19:39:55","modified_gmt":"2013-05-19T01:39:55","slug":"ospreys-in-shooting-conditions-that-drove-me-a-little-nutser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/19\/ospreys-in-shooting-conditions-that-drove-me-a-little-nutser\/","title":{"rendered":"Ospreys In Shooting Conditions That Drove Me A Little Nuts(er)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every bird photographer has horror stories about potentially great opportunities with birds that were ruined to some degree or another by\u00a0tough shooting conditions.\u00a0 Well I met my match on my recent trip to\u00a0Flaming Gorge.\u00a0 I believe that this trip had the most challenging light, weather and other factors I’ve ever faced on an extended camping\/photo trip – even beating trips to Montana\u00a0when I was photographing Short-eared Owls.<\/p>\n

Occasionally\u00a0I had good light (and I got some shots that I like a lot, even under challenging conditions) but one of the problems was that the light changed so fast and so often. For days\u00a0<\/em>!\u00a0\u00a0Much of the time the birds were flying against partly cloudy skies which constantly changed the background, thus the exposure.\u00a0\u00a0And then the mountain would instantly become the background which usually had mottled light and was darker than the sky so exposure requirements often changed several times per second in both situations.\u00a0 Since I shoot in aperture priority this meant many blown shots (and cuss words).<\/p>\n

The following two images illustrate some of these changing conditions with a perched Osprey.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/160, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I mentioned in my previous post that we had about 5 minutes of light at dawn on our last morning\u00a0before the sun rose into the clouds.\u00a0 Here the very warm light from the rising sun\u00a0has hit the mountain background and turned it this glowing burnt-orange color.\u00a0 Most of the light hasn’t reached the bird yet, just enough to give it pretty good detail.\u00a0 (I have cloned out a\u00a0wire attached to the perch in both shots so that it doesn’t distract from my point about light).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/250, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Approximately one minute later there is this extremely dramatic change – same bird and perch and I haven’t moved my shooting position.\u00a0 The sun has risen into the clouds enough to put the mountain in the background in shade but now there’s good light on the bird.\u00a0 And it’s\u00a0now raining, as you can see in the background (particularly at upper left).\u00a0\u00a0 This kind of thing was almost constantly occurring in the three days we were with these birds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/1000, f\/4, ISO 1250, 500 f\/4,\u00a0 natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The rain presents its own challenges to both bird and photographer.\u00a0 When it’s raining hard enough image quality can suffer because of the raindrops between lens and subject and if the wind’s blowing (as it was) you can’t keep water drops off your lens even with the lens hood in place.\u00a0 But I shouldn’t complain – I was shooting out of my pickup and stayed dry (unlike my lens poking out the window) but the best the poor Osprey on eggs could do was shake herself off occasionally and go back to work\u00a0(I think<\/em> this was the female).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

\u00a01\/8000, f\/4, ISO 800, 500 f\/4,\u00a0 natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I did get quite a few shots that I like but with the constantly changing conditions I was often just lucky.\u00a0 This image is a case in point.\u00a0 Here the male (lack of a prominent necklace) is delivering more nesting material (juniper bark) to the nest as the female incubates.\u00a0\u00a0But check out my camera settings.\u00a0 1\/8000 second at ISO 800? – gimme a break!\u00a0\u00a0 Just before this shot was taken I’d been shooting in much less light\u00a0and then the sun came out in a nanosecond\u00a0and I had the choice – change my settings and risk missing the shot while I made the adjustments or take my chances.\u00a0\u00a0I chose the latter and this\u00a0time it worked out but usually it didn’t.<\/p>\n

The shooting challenges of this trip were numerous but I think I’m beginning to sound like I’m complaining so I’ll only briefly mention one more.\u00a0 I don’t have a lot of experience with Ospreys but I’ve NEVER seen a species that spends so much time preening.\u00a0 Both birds, male and female, would preen for many hours each day – usually while on an ugly perch and too far away for photography\u00a0as the mate incubated.\u00a0 Waiting for hours for such a bird to take off in order to get a shot that you like takes some patience.\u00a0 I certainly don’t begrudge them their grooming, I’m just stating what I observed.\u00a0 I suspect that they spent more time grooming than I’m used to seeing in other species because of the rain and\u00a0also because of the abuse their feathers take on impact when they dive for fish.<\/p>\n

I learned some valuable photography lessons from these birds and now that my frustrations are behind me I’ll give them their due and thank them for the education.\u00a0 And for the time they allowed me to spend with them – they’re truly magnificent raptors.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Every bird photographer has horror stories about potentially great opportunities with birds that were ruined to some degree or another by miserable shooting conditions. Well I met my match on my recent trip to Flaming Gorge.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15351,"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":[34,1459,500,240,719,259,311],"class_list":["post-15350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-osprey-diurnal-raptors","tag-aperture-priority","tag-challenging-lighting-conditions","tag-flaming-gorge","tag-osprey","tag-pandion-haliaetus","tag-rain","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/osprey-0419-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-3ZA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15350","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=15350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}