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1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Cannon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nThis one is from yesterday morning on Antelope Island. I like it for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that the magpie is landing and not taking off. Landing shots are difficult because you never actually know where or in what position\u00a0the bird will touch down and you must already have it in focus as it does so. There are two main strategies for getting this kind of image – try to keep focus locked on the bird as it’s coming in to\u00a0the perch or pre-focus on the presumed perch and hope that the bird actually lands there. In this case I mostly got lucky – I didn’t notice the bird coming in until the last second so I quickly raised my lens and fired even before I knew that my focus had locked on to anything, bird, perch or something else. I owe the\u00a0fact that the magpie is sharp to the quick focusing abilities of the Canon 7D Mark II and to the gods of bird photography…<\/p>\n
This image illustrates an interesting point\u00a0about Black-billed Magpies. It was taken in early morning light and typically I’d have had significant iridescence in the bird but there’s none showing. That’s because the feathers of this species only have iridescent qualities\u00a0on the dorsal side of its wings and tail and in this shot we only see the ventral surfaces there. I’m fine with that and think that the gloriously fanned and interestingly shaped\u00a0tail more than makes up for it.<\/p>\n
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![\"black-billed](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/black-billed-magpie-focus-points-8214-ron-dudley.jpg\")
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I was curious about where my active focus point actually was when I took the shot so I pulled it into Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (software that comes with Canon cameras) to see if I was locked on to the bird or the perch or something else. The red focus point is the\u00a0one that locked on (I had\u00a05 center points activated) so you\u00a0can see how lucky I was. I might just as easily have locked on to the front of the bush which would have\u00a0made the magpie\u00a0fairly soft.\u00a0This\u00a0version of the image is full frame and\u00a0not sharpened or processed (other than conversion from RAW to JPEG and addition of focus points).<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
PS – I was tempted to rotate the image to level the blue “horizon line” at the top of the image but in the end I didn’t for three reasons:<\/p>\n
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- the interface between blue and brown isn’t horizon, it’s the shore of the Great Salt Lake and I believe this version represents its actual sloping\u00a0angle<\/li>\n
- rotating the image made the angle of attack of the magpie look somewhat unrealistic to my eye<\/li>\n
- rotating would have meant that I’d have to add canvas up top\u00a0to get a composition that appealed to me. I try to avoid adding canvas whenever possible<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
One additional point. You’ll notice that the colors are more vivid in the first version of the image than they are in the second. I suspect that’s because of a difference in the way colors are rendered in Photoshop versus DPR. No saturation or other kind of color manipulation was done to either version of\u00a0the image<\/p>\n
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My appreciation of magpies as photographic subjects continues to grow.<\/p>\n