{"id":31627,"date":"2015-05-27T05:10:26","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T11:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=31627"},"modified":"2015-05-27T05:10:26","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T11:10:26","slug":"curlew-landing-amongst-the-flowers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/27\/curlew-landing-amongst-the-flowers\/","title":{"rendered":"Curlew Landing Amongst The Flowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Long-billed Curlew made\u00a0several transitions as it came in to land – from poor light to good light, from a mostly\u00a0featureless background to an interesting one and\u00a0it touched down in a field of flowers. This 7 image sequence was photographed two days ago on Antelope Island.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

I had been photographing a different curlew\u00a0to my left when this bird flew in with the apparent intention of joining it on the ground. Of course I had no idea where it would land and\u00a0my side of the bird was in shade as it approached\u00a0but I kept my lens on it anyway because with birds you just never know what might happen. The curlew made a big, slow gliding\u00a0turn in front of me as it descended and as it slowly turned my way…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

the lighting improved considerably, though the background doesn’t yet have a lot of interest for me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

But as the bird dropped lower I think the setting improved dramatically. I’ve cropped this image to a somewhat unconventional composition to accommodate the flowers in the foreground. The background is a hill that slopes to my left so I’ve resisted rotating the image to level the horizon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

The danger in situations like this with tall vegetation in the foreground is that the focusing sensors will lock on to the plants instead of the bird…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1250, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

and that’s exactly what happened in\u00a0the next\u00a0frame so the bird is noticeably soft but I decided to include it because I thought the landing posture was important to the sequence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

I reacquired pretty good focus lock on the bird in the next frame\u00a0just before touch-down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"long-billed<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, 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

And then, as curlews are prone to do just after landing, the bird seemed to celebrate its successful\u00a0flight maneuver with an extended wings-up display amongst the flowers.<\/p>\n

Because of all our rain this spring the vegetation on the island is unusually tall and lush so it’s difficult (going on impossible) to get a clear shot of your subject on the ground. But I thought this posture with the\u00a0curlew surrounded by flowers worked quite well even though we can’t see\u00a0a large portion\u00a0of the bird.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

This Long-billed Curlew made several transitions as it came in to land – from poor light to good light, from a mostly featureless background to an interesting one and it touched down in a field of flowers. This 7 image sequence was photographed two days ago on Antelope Island.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31633,"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":[3,334,369],"tags":[31,146,1422,579,208,427,311],"class_list":["post-31627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-long-billed-curlews","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-flight","tag-flowers","tag-landing","tag-long-billed-curlew","tag-numenius-americanus","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/long-billed-curlew-2719-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8e7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31627","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=31627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}