{"id":24477,"date":"2014-06-15T05:39:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-15T11:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=24477"},"modified":"2014-06-15T06:02:22","modified_gmt":"2014-06-15T12:02:22","slug":"my-favorite-image-from-my-time-with-the-nest-building-kingbirds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/15\/my-favorite-image-from-my-time-with-the-nest-building-kingbirds\/","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Image From My Time With The Nest-building Kingbirds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week I spent several mornings photographing a female Western Kingbird as she was constructing her nest.\u00a0 Out of the many hundreds of shots I took of her the third image in this post is my favorite.\u00a0 I include these first two\u00a0photos only for context.<\/p>\n

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\"western<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Here you see the nest at bottom\u00a0\u00a0It was partially buried in sagebrush and her access to it was from the north.\u00a0 She would fly in with nesting material, arrange it to her satisfaction for several minutes and\u00a0then exit the nest unpredictably and explosively.\u00a0 At first my angle of view looked directly into the nest but while she was hunkered down in there she was too obscured for decent photographs and when she took off (as she’s doing here) I mostly got head-on shots with a very busy background so I soon changed my angle on the nest.<\/p>\n

I include this image so you can see her only choice of egress – this opening to the north with a clump of living and dead sagebrush twigs (hereafter\u00a0referred to as “the clump”)\u00a0sticking up directly in front\u00a0of her.\u00a0 She could launch to either side of it, over the top of\u00a0it or split the difference.\u00a0\u00a0Partially depending on wind direction she did all three…<\/p>\n

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\"western<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

which meant that when I changed my shooting position to get a cleaner background and a side view of her takeoff I struggled\u00a0to get\u00a0her sharp because of depth of field issues.\u00a0 The DOF of my 500mm lens is very shallow and I had to pre-focus at the distance where I thought she might leave which might be to the left of the clump, to the right (less often) or over the top of it.\u00a0\u00a0In other words, it was a guessing game and I had to get lucky but when I finally had enough light (we started\u00a0photographing just after dawn)\u00a0to shoot at f\/8 and still have a shutter speed of 1\/3200 (which I prefer for small birds in flight) I had enough DOF to get both bird and sagebrush mostly sharp (I know that’s a lot of photography techno-speak but to photographers it’s important stuff…)<\/p>\n

This image and the next one are sequential in a burst as she\u00a0took off.\u00a0 She launched almost directly over the\u00a0top of the clump and slightly to its left…<\/p>\n

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\"western<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/8, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

and timed it so that her right wing was in the up position as she passed it.\u00a0 My shutter clicked at just the right nanosecond and this was the result.<\/p>\n

These are the things I like about the image:<\/p>\n