{"id":52894,"date":"2017-10-25T05:47:21","date_gmt":"2017-10-25T11:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=52894"},"modified":"2017-10-25T06:36:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T12:36:33","slug":"my-highest-quality-kingfisher-images-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/25\/my-highest-quality-kingfisher-images-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"My Highest Quality Kingfisher Images Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Persistence finally paid off. And I do mean I was stubborn<\/em> with this bird!<\/p>\n

I’ve been trying to get high quality close-up\u00a0images of this male Belted Kingfisher for many weeks now but\u00a0the darn bird has been almost as stubborn as I have. He shows up like clockwork\u00a0almost every\u00a0day at about the same time at a spot near the Jordan River and\u00a0he may be\u00a0punctual but whenever he’d land close to my pickup he’d immediately take off as soon as he saw me (very, very slowly)\u00a0raise my lens. He definitely didn’t want to be famous.<\/p>\n

But I kept at it for weeks. I’d deliberately park in the same spot every\u00a0day when there was good light to try to get\u00a0him acclimated to me and my pickup. Two days ago I could tell that he was finally\u00a0beginning to accept my presence because several times he perched close to me in the tree but he\u00a0always chose a perch that had branches between us. And then yesterday afternoon he chose two (count’em, two!) exposed nearby perches and I was able to get many\u00a0photos of him\u00a0I like because he was close enough for excellent detail, he was in good light and there were no obscuring or distracting branches.<\/p>\n

It was almost like he chose those perches to please me, perhaps out of pity…<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

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

He spent eleven minutes on this branch right in front of me. In a larger version of the image the detail is excellent, the entire bird and the entire perch are sharp, there’s no distracting branches and he even has his tail on our side of the branch so we can see\u00a0all of\u00a0it.\u00a0And the\u00a0perch isn’t bright white like most of the others in this tree.<\/p>\n

I’ve never photographed\u00a0a kingfisher this close without distracting elements in the image.\u00a0As\u00a0any bird photographer knows this species is notoriously skittish and uncooperative.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But you know me, I did find something to complain about. He was so focused on his fishing that he gave me very few varying poses. While he was on this perch\u00a0this open beak and tilted head was about as much variety as I got. It also\u00a0would have been nice to have a few puffy white clouds in the background but I won’t whine about that.<\/p>\n

When he finally did take off after a fish he was successful…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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

but he landed far away to gobble it down. For some reason this branch low over the water is his absolute favorite dining table.<\/p>\n

Dang it was fun to watch a kingfisher up close through my lens.\u00a0Believe me it’s been a long time coming but I paid a big price for the privilege.\u00a0I have a chronic\u00a0bad back and I had to twist in my seat at a crazy and\u00a0uncomfortable\u00a0angle for so long to get these and many other shots\u00a0that I’ve seriously aggravated my symptoms so the next few days could be interesting.<\/p>\n

I could easily be convinced that bird photographers are certifiably\u00a0crazy.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Persistence finally paid off. And I do mean I was stubborn with this bird!<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52901,"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":[2853,6,334,392],"tags":[2329,3385,3628,211,3089,311],"class_list":["post-52894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-ceryle-alcyon","tag-high-quality-images","tag-male","tag-salt-lake-county","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/belted-kingfisher-8096b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dL8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52894","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=52894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}