{"id":24058,"date":"2014-05-23T05:26:44","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T11:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=24058"},"modified":"2014-05-23T05:26:44","modified_gmt":"2014-05-23T11:26:44","slug":"mockingbird-flight-display-and-a-change-in-shooting-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/23\/mockingbird-flight-display-and-a-change-in-shooting-technique\/","title":{"rendered":"Mockingbird Flight Display (and a change in shooting technique)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This spring I’ve had several opportunities to photograph the courtship “flight display” of the male Northern Mockingbird.\u00a0 While singing\u00a0continuously\u00a0from his perch he jumps almost\u00a0straight up about six feet as he flaps his wings a couple of times which displays those conspicuous white wing patches and then parachutes down with wings open to the same perch.\u00a0\u00a0 This performance is\u00a0repeated every 30-60 seconds or so for an extended period of time.<\/p>\n

I’ve been somewhat disappointed with\u00a0most of those shots for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that\u00a0once the\u00a0bird leaves his perch it’s very difficult to maintain or acquire focus on him.\u00a0 By the time focus has\u00a0almost been acquired on him in the air he’s already dropped back down to the perch.<\/p>\n

So two days ago I decided to change my tactics.<\/p>\n

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\"northern<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Shooting vertically (rotating the camera 90 degrees) from my pickup with my huge lens is extremely awkward but I decided to try it because I could prefocus on the perched bird, recompose with just the bird and a small bit of the perch in frame, and have almost twice as much room up top in the frame to catch the bird in flight.\u00a0 And since he always jumps almost straight up I wouldn’t have to re-acquire focus on the bird in the air and I could fire a continuous burst to catch him in a variety of poses on the same flight.<\/p>\n

Here the bird is just leaving the perch.\u00a0 With him this close to the perch focusing wouldn’t have been a problem with either technique.<\/p>\n

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\"northern<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But when he’s near the apex of his flight as he is here I would usually miss the shot.\u00a0 This image is cropped to about 50% of full frame.<\/p>\n

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\"northern<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s the same image, cropped very little.\u00a0\u00a0 Even though the bird is much smaller in the frame I actually prefer this version because the inclusion of the perch allows the viewer a better interpretation of the behavior.\u00a0 If I hadn’t been shooting vertically I wouldn’t have had enough room to include both bird and perch.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Here’s another image where I used the same vertical shooting technique, only this time the mockingbird is beginning to parachute down to the perch.\u00a0\u00a0 A relatively tight crop shows the bird well…<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

but once again I prefer the version with very little cropping\u00a0because it\u00a0includes the perch.\u00a0 This was only possible because I was shooting vertically.<\/p>\n

I didn’t even think of trying this technique until near the end of my last session with this\u00a0mockingbird two days ago.\u00a0 If I get another opportunity with the behavior this spring I’ll give the technique a real workout.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

This spring I’ve had several opportunities to photograph the courtship “flight display” of the male Northern Mockingbird. While singing continuously from his perch he jumps almost straight up about six feet as he flaps his wings a couple of times which displays those conspicuous white wing patches and then parachutes down with wings open to the same perch. This performance is repeated every 30-60 seconds or so for an extended period of time. <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24062,"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":[3,6,334,395],"tags":[1647,2000,1999,702,2028],"class_list":["post-24058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","tag-courtship-display","tag-flight-display","tag-mimus-polyglottus","tag-northern-mockingbird","tag-shooting-vertically"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/northern-mockingbird-2734b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-6g2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24058","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=24058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}