{"id":40578,"date":"2016-07-06T06:16:04","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T12:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=40578"},"modified":"2016-07-06T14:33:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-06T20:33:08","slug":"loggerhead-shrikes-and-the-curse-of-the-teleconverter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/06\/loggerhead-shrikes-and-the-curse-of-the-teleconverter\/","title":{"rendered":"Loggerhead Shrikes And The Curse Of The Teleconverter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love my 1.4 teleconverter. While using my cropped sensor camera and attached 500mm lens I’m shooting at an effective 800mm but when I slap on the tc\u00a0I instantly jump to 1120mm with no noticeable loss of image quality. As every bird photographer knows, birds tend to be shy and unapproachable so that extra reach makes a significant positive difference. And I have so much experience with the tc it only takes me about 5 seconds to swap it out.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to birds 5 seconds can be an eternity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday morning I spent some time with a family of Loggerhead Shrikes in the Stansbury Mountains. The youngsters had fledged and were occasionally catching their own insects (as I’ll document in a future post)\u00a0but they were still expecting to be fed by their parents.\u00a0The young birds were hanging around a fence line next to a road and whenever one of the adults would come in they would mob that parent for food.<\/p>\n

Here the adult had landed on one of the fence posts apparently just to check on the welfare of the youngsters. It didn’t have any food but this juvenile mobbed it anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

The young bird was so insistent and obnoxious about its demand for food that it literally walked on the back of its parent which definitely didn’t please the adult.<\/p>\n

I was extremely disappointed to have had my teleconverter on during this encounter because it made me too close optically so\u00a0I cut off body parts in almost every shot. And if I hadn’t had the tc attached I’d have had more depth of field to get multiple birds sharp. But I had been shooting individual birds just\u00a0before all this\u00a0excitement went down and the tc gave me just about the right magnification for that situation.<\/p>\n

Ok, now I had a decision to make. There was still lots of frenzied shrike activity happening on various posts and other perches up and down the fence line – some were close to me and some weren’t. Do I take the time to remove my tc or leave it on?<\/p>\n

Sadly, I made the wrong decision and left it on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

As soon as the adult left the post in the previous images this youngster landed on the same perch. I was at the perfect optical\u00a0distance for an individual bird but if another one entered the frame I would be too close.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

And sure enough that’s exactly what happened. One of the other juveniles came in apparently to steal (nonexistent) food from its sibling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it noticed that there wasn’t any food…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

it flew directly over its sibling…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

(who wasn’t happy about the intrusion) and went on to land somewhere else.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here the first bird tries to stabilize itself on the perch after the encounter.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the teleconverter, sometimes I make the right choice and sometimes I don’t. My readers know that I love documenting bird behaviors well and these and many other images would have been much better if I hadn’t been using the teleconverter because I clipped or cut off so many body parts and in quite a few of those images I didn’t have enough depth of field for multiple subjects.<\/p>\n

It’s\u00a0all part of the\u00a0game. Birds don’t tell me what they’re about to do or where they’re going to do it so I have to go with my hunches and see what happens.<\/p>\n

But it sure is painful when I make the wrong decision about teleconverter use.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: I’ve left image #6 uncropped (full frame)\u00a0so readers can get a feel for how optically close I was with the tc attached.\u00a0Except for the last photo the others\u00a0have been cropped very little.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

I love my 1.4 teleconverter but it sure is painful when I make the wrong decision about using it.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40579,"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":[334,392,394,346],"tags":[3010,757,409,206,1396,294,311],"class_list":["post-40578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","tag-canon-1-4-teleconverter","tag-juveniles","tag-lanius-ludovicianus","tag-loggerhead-shrike","tag-siblings","tag-stansbury-mountains","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/loggerhead-shrike-6261-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ayu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40578","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=40578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}