{"id":19338,"date":"2013-10-17T06:02:52","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T12:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=19338"},"modified":"2013-10-17T06:02:52","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T12:02:52","slug":"male-northern-harrier-in-flight-a-lucky-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/17\/male-northern-harrier-in-flight-a-lucky-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"Male Northern Harrier In Flight – A Lucky Shot"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are lots of reasons why bird photography isn’t easy.\u00a0 Here’s one of them.<\/p>\n

Many photographers have difficulty getting even a perched bird critically sharp while using a long lens that by definition will have a shallow field of focus.\u00a0 But when the bird is in flight the degree of difficulty is magnified exponentially because of the challenges of keeping an erratically and fast-moving subject in sharp\u00a0focus.\u00a0 With skill the task can be manageable if the background is clean (sky for example) or far away from the bird which makes it significantly easier for the focusing mechanism to lock on to the bird instead of the background.<\/p>\n

But if there’s a textured\u00a0background very close to the bird a hurried plea to the gods of photography is in order because without their help you’re most likely to get a sharp background\u00a0but the bird will be a blurry blob.<\/p>\n

But occasionally, very<\/em> occasionally,\u00a0the photography gods do interdict on your behalf…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

1\/2000, f\/8, ISO 500, 500 f\/4, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This male Northern Harrier was hunting the edges of a relatively straight wall of phragmites next to a dirt road at Farmington Bay.\u00a0 In order to hunt this productive area he would fly very close to the wall of plants as he passed\u00a0between me and the phragmites, which kept him as far away from my pickup as possible.\u00a0 He made several passes like this, looking down most of the time but when he was closest to me he would quickly glance my way to check me out.<\/p>\n

Somehow I managed to get two sharp shots of him as he passed\u00a0– this is one of them.\u00a0 His right wing-tip was only inches from the plants so I ended up\u00a0culling dozens of sharp shots of phragmites.\u00a0 You’ll notice from my techs\u00a0that I wasn’t using my teleconverter (tc) at the time – if I had been, even those two shots would have been blurry (the tc slows down focusing).\u00a0 Ironically this image is one of the sharpest flight shots in my portfolio.<\/p>\n

Which just goes to show that if you plug away at it long enough you can eventually get lucky.<\/p>\n

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

There are lots of reasons why bird photography isn’t easy. Here’s one of them.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19339,"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":[6,334,341],"tags":[634,86,134,146,147,746,211,234,250,453],"class_list":["post-19338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-northern-harriers","tag-background","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-farmington-bay-wildlife-management-area","tag-flight","tag-focus","tag-gray-ghost","tag-male","tag-northern-harrier","tag-phragmites","tag-teleconverter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/northern-harrier-3132-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-51U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19338","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=19338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}