{"id":47857,"date":"2017-04-29T05:10:15","date_gmt":"2017-04-29T11:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=47857"},"modified":"2017-04-29T05:38:16","modified_gmt":"2017-04-29T11:38:16","slug":"white-pelican-in-flight-against-a-mottled-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/29\/white-pelican-in-flight-against-a-mottled-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"White Pelican In Flight Against A Mottled Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often think of American White Pelicans as flying boats. They’re huge and ungainly looking on land but in flight they’re ever so graceful.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I photographed this one last August at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge at the edge of a large impoundment where I was photographing other birds. When pelicans are in flight they typically don’t flap their wings much so I find it difficult to get dynamic wing positions. But this one came in close,\u00a0the light angle is interesting and I really like the mottled background as opposed to homogenous blue or white sky.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is about as much wing flapping as I got. But the flight posture is slightly different and combined with the changes in the background this shot is different enough from the previous one that I decided to\u00a0include them both.<\/p>\n

The size of these birds in flight and up close is always impressive. They average about 16.5 lbs in weight but they’ve been reported as large as 29.92 lbs (that bird was reported by Dr. William H. Behle,\u00a0my old Ornithology professor at the University of Utah). For the sake of comparison Great Blue Herons average about 6.4 lbs.<\/p>\n

When this bird unexpectedly appeared I’d been photographing other birds on the darker water so I had no time to make any camera adjustments when I raised my lens for it – thus the incredibly fast shutter speed. I call shutter speeds in this range “hummingbird speeds”.<\/p>\n

But I’ll guarantee you one thing – there isn’t any motion blur in this pelican’s wings!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note\u00a0to photographers – I was using my older Canon 7D because at the time my 7D Mark II wasn’t functioning correctly. <\/em><\/p>\n

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I often think of American White Pelicans as flying boats. They’re huge and ungainly looking on land but in flight they’re ever so graceful.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47858,"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":[3374,338,6,334,424],"tags":[420,49,146,222,2654,311,3373],"class_list":["post-47857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-white-pelicans","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-pelicans","tag-american-white-pelican","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-flight","tag-motion-blur","tag-pelicanus-erythrorhynchos","tag-utah-2","tag-weight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/american-white-pelican-0618-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-crT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47857","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=47857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}