{"id":43433,"date":"2016-11-12T06:39:16","date_gmt":"2016-11-12T13:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=43433"},"modified":"2016-11-12T07:46:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-12T14:46:03","slug":"a-lepidopteran-change-of-pace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/11\/12\/a-lepidopteran-change-of-pace\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lepidopteran Change Of Pace"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to feature birds of a different feather this morning – Hummingbird Moths in flight.<\/p>\n

They’re\u00a0often\u00a0called Hummingbird Moths because they hover in the air as they feed on flower nectar just like\u00a0hummingbirds do but the proper common name of the species I photographed is White-lined Sphinx\u00a0Moth. Because of their fairly\u00a0large size and feeding habits they’re often mistaken for hummingbirds. I spent several\u00a0mornings with them back in August of 2014.<\/p>\n

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\"white-lined-sphinx-moth-0557b-ron-dudley\"1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

The moths would use their very long proboscis to feed on the nectar of\u00a0Rocky Mountain Bee Plant on Antelope Island. Photographing them well in flight was a\u00a0difficult task but I really enjoyed the challenge and even got some images of them I like very much.<\/p>\n

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\"white-lined-sphinx-moth-0785c-ron-dudley\"1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because of the speed of the wings and my extremely limited depth of field at these close distances I often had great difficulty getting the entire insect sharp. In this photo only the head is sharp so I thought about tossing the image until I looked at an extreme crop of the photo.<\/p>\n

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\"white-lined-sphinx-moth-0785d-ron-dudley\"\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This version of the previous shot is cropped to only 7.5% of the original image (1.5 MP of the original 20 MP). I enjoy the detail such a crop allows us to see including the pollen stuck to its body from its feeding activities. Notice that there’s pollen actually clinging to its eye.<\/p>\n

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\"white-lined-sphinx-moth-0505-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

1\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 640, Canon 7D,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Occasionally I could get most of the moth sharp so I like this image a lot\u00a0despite the diagonal light-colored band in the background. It was fascinating to watch that incredibly long proboscis fold up into a compact little coil under its “chin” but I\u00a0got very few\u00a0quality images\u00a0with it in a coiled position.<\/p>\n

I’ve been watching for these moths on the island for the past two summers but there’s been very little bee plant so I haven’t seen any moths since 2014.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I decided to feature birds of a different feather this morning – Hummingbird Moths in flight.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43434,"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":true,"_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],"tags":[31,105,146,2168,2171,1833,2169,1679,2167,311,2170],"class_list":["post-43433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-depth-of-field","tag-flight","tag-hummingbird-moth","tag-hyles-lineata","tag-pollen","tag-proboscis","tag-rocky-mountain-bee-plant","tag-sphinx-moth","tag-utah-2","tag-white-lined-sphinx-moth"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/white-lined-sphinx-moth-0505-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-bix","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43433","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=43433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}