![\"western](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/western-meadowlark-6366-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\nYesterday was a meadowlark take-off kind of morning. Regular readers know that I’m fond of this kind of action shot but for a variety of reasons I find them difficult to achieve so I was happy to get two of them I liked within such a short time.<\/p>\n
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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n My tendency is to prefer plenty of habitat in most of my bird photographs but I lean toward clean backgrounds for take-off shots because they tend to highlight the action pose of the bird better (and because clean backgrounds make it easier to keep focus locked on the bird as it takes flight). In this case the background is the mudflats of the Great Salt Lake. Here you can see that the sagebrush on Antelope Island is finally\u00a0beginning to green-up nicely.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Composition for this shot was a challenge. I don’t particularly like squarish framing but I had no more room on the right so I cropped it to vertical with as many pixels as were available to me without adding canvas. The\u00a0bird may be a little tight in the frame for some\u00a0but I do\u00a0like the detail the close crop provides.<\/p>\n One of my\u00a0little idiosyncrasies is the fact that many (though not all)\u00a0imperfections in my\u00a0avian subjects actually appeal to me. To me they\u00a0often help to provide that “natural” look – after all, nature isn’t perfect. In this case the imperfection is provided by the small and unruly\u00a0white feather poking up from the back of the neck of the bird.<\/p>\n I guess you could call me an imperfectionist…<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday was a meadowlark take-off kind of morning. Regular readers know that I’m fond of this kind of action shot but for a variety of reasons I find them difficult to achieve.<\/p>\n![\"western](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/western-meadowlark-6884-ron-dudley.jpg\")
1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 400, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n