{"id":170030,"date":"2025-11-03T06:18:47","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T13:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170030"},"modified":"2025-11-03T07:21:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T14:21:16","slug":"female-belted-kingfisher-diving-on-a-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/03\/female-belted-kingfisher-diving-on-a-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Belted Kingfisher Diving On A Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes, thanks largely to the excellent bokeh<\/a><\/span><\/em> qualities of my particular lens, magic happens in my backgrounds.<\/p>\n

This fall I’ve occasionally been hearing and seeing Belted Kingfishers near the Jordan River but with all the leaves on the trees I haven’t been able to get any clear shots of them. That’s beginning to change as the trees shed their leaves.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Yesterday morning, when I found this female fishing above one of the ponds, I had to “micro-tune” the position of my pickup in order to have any chance of getting a background I liked. There were houses behind the trees that would very likely ruin the backgrounds of any diving shots I might get.<\/p>\n

I wish she’d been closer so I could get better detail but there’s an upside to being farther away from kingfishers when they’re fishing.\u00a0 Their dives on fish are explosively fast so being farther away gives me more room to keep them in frame during a dive.<\/p>\n

This time I got three shots of her in diving flight before she was out of frame. I like two of them, but you won’t be seeing the third because in that one there were out of focus leaves in front of her.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the first one. She’s nearly centered in the frame because I wanted to include part of her fishing perch at upper left.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the second one. Her flight posture in both photos is almost identical, but the backgrounds are quite different.<\/p>\n

The more I looked at this background, particularly near the bottom of the frame, the more I was intrigued by all those swirly patterns and colors.<\/p>\n

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So, I tried a more unconventional composition of the same photo that included more of the background below her.<\/p>\n

I love the bokeh in the bottom third of the frame. The golds and reddish-brown hues come from the fall colors of two species of trees. And believe it or not, those whites come from a house in the far background.<\/p>\n

My lens is known for the quality of the bokeh it produces and this time I think it outdid itself. The beauty and appeal of background bokeh is in the eye of the beholder but for my tastes this one couldn’t be more interesting.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m only including this shot to give readers a better idea of the origins of those colors and patterns and how far away I was from the bird.<\/p>\n

Oh, and by the way. She caught a fish on this dive and returned with it to the same perch.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But it wasn’t big enough to write home to Mom about.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: Just to be clear, I pulled no processing shenanigans with any of these photos. The backgrounds (and bird) are just as they came out of the camera.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Sometimes magic happens in my backgrounds. (6 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170034,"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":[2853,334],"tags":[7895,7896,1239],"class_list":["post-170030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-birds","tag-belted-kingfisher-in-flight","tag-bokeh-quality-of-the-canon-ef500mm-f-4l-is-ii-usm","tag-diving"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/belted-kingfisher-8797-horizontal-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Ieq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170030","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=170030"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170069,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170030\/revisions\/170069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}