{"id":16325,"date":"2013-06-21T04:00:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=16325"},"modified":"2013-06-20T21:28:55","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T03:28:55","slug":"swainsons-hawk-in-full-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/21\/swainsons-hawk-in-full-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Swainson’s Hawk In Full Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Montana (and elsewhere I presume) orange paint on fence posts\u00a0is used to mark private property and prevent trespass and hunting without permission on private lands.\u00a0 Apparently some land owners are color blind and use red paint instead of orange but the universally understood\u00a0message is still the same – stay out!<\/p>\n

Not all of the posts are so-marked (perhaps 10%?) but the birds I photograph sure have a nasty habit of\u00a0choosing those ugly painted\u00a0posts to perch on when I’m\u00a0 trying to photograph them.\u00a0 Such was the case with this Swainson’s Hawk a few days ago in\u00a0western Montana.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

My only chance for an acceptable\u00a0image or two\u00a0of this bird was during or soon\u00a0after take-off so I took a few shots while it was perched and waited to see what would happen.\u00a0 I only waited for a few seconds before a huge (and I do mean huge<\/em>) logging truck came\u00a0lumbering (pun intended)\u00a0down the narrow dirt road toward me.<\/p>\n

This was a moment of semi-panic for both me and the bird.\u00a0 In this shot the hawk is watching the truck coming toward\u00a0me from my right and probably trying to decide when to take off and in what direction.\u00a0 I’m parked with my pickup straddled across the road (had to, in order to get a line of sight on the bird while shooting out my window) so I know I have to move for the truck, and soon.\u00a0 I quickly removed my tc in order to have a better chance of not clipping the bird when it took off.\u00a0 I focused on the bird but had to look away from my viewfinder to see where the truck was.<\/p>\n

That’s\u00a0the moment the bird took off to my left\u00a0and I missed it completely.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Typically with a background like this that would be all she wrote because I’d never be able to lock onto the bird again with the background so close to the\u00a0subject but I instinctively tried anyway and\u00a0was amazed that I grabbed focus almost immediately and got four sharp shots as the hawk flew by.\u00a0\u00a0 If I’d had my tc attached I don’t believe I’d have been able to lock on to the bird.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"swainson's<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, 500 f\/4, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

None of the four images had the wings in the completely up or completely down position but at least they weren’t parallel to the viewer.<\/p>\n

One more note that only photographers may be interested in.\u00a0 During this sequence I mistakenly had my lens “limiter” turned off (the limiter prevents the focusing mechanism from having to search the entire depth of field from infinity to the closest focusing ability of the lens, which takes time).\u00a0 So the fact that these shots turned out sharp was mostly pure, dumb luck.<\/p>\n

But I’ll take it.\u00a0 I have very few images of Swainson’s Hawks in full flight (not take-off, with legs and feet tucked and at full speed), especially with a background other than sky.<\/p>\n

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

In Montana (and elsewhere I presume) orange paint on fence posts is used to mark private property and prevent trespass and hunting without permission on private lands. Apparently some land owners are color blind and use red paint instead of orange but the universally understood message is still the same – stay out!<\/p>\n

Not all of the posts are so-marked (perhaps 10%?) but the birds I photograph sure have a nasty habit of choosing those ugly posts to perch on when I’m trying to photograph them. Such was the case with this Swainson’s Hawk a few days ago in western Montana.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16327,"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":[6,334,1493,645],"tags":[647,1529,220,646,453],"class_list":["post-16325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-swainsons-hawks","tag-buteo-swainsoni","tag-limiter","tag-montana-2","tag-swainsons-hawk","tag-teleconverter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/swainsons-hawk-8291-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4fj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16325","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=16325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}