{"id":53112,"date":"2017-10-31T05:42:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T11:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=53112"},"modified":"2017-10-31T05:56:11","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T11:56:11","slug":"belted-kingfisher-takeoff-and-flight-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/31\/belted-kingfisher-takeoff-and-flight-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Belted Kingfisher Takeoff And Flight Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plus my strategy for dealing with double catch lights in the eye.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, 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

Three days ago the male Belted Kingfisher I’ve been photographing\u00a0lately gave me a second chance when I botched the first one. My primary goal was flight shots whenever he took off from this perch which I’ve referred to before as his “favorite dining table” because he nearly always lands here before swallowing his\u00a0catch. When this shot was taken he had just swallowed a fish and quickly roused (shook his feathers)\u00a0as he usually does before taking off for his favorite fishing perch to start all over again (those stubby little legs he’s pushing off with make me smile).<\/p>\n

But this time I\u00a0screwed up the\u00a0flight shots so five minutes later…<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 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 gave me another shot (or two) at it after he caught and swallowed another fish and this time I had better luck. Notice that he’s launching from almost the same spot as he did previously.<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 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

This shot is probably my favorite in the series because the branches he’s approaching haven’t bisected his body yet and I like the wing positions and the excellent eye contact in flight.<\/p>\n

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1\/8000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 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

As he began to bank to his left he gave me a great look at his right wing and that might be the most fully extended alula of any bird in flight I’ve ever seen, at least in my own photos. I didn’t even know they were capable<\/em> of being extended that far forward.<\/p>\n

I’m not happy with the branches behind the bird however.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, 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

This is where he landed a couple of seconds later and as you can see from his obvious fishing posture as he scanned the water below he was still hungry after eating two pretty good-sized\u00a0fish in five minutes.<\/p>\n

Notice the double catch light in his eye in this photo. I’m not always fond of double catch lights and I’ll sometimes remove one of them when I think the extra one came from an unnatural source.\u00a0One of these two\u00a0came from the sun behind me but for complicated reasons the second one was unlikely to have been a natural reflection off of water. I suspect it was a reflection from my pickup – possibly my bumper or even a window so…<\/p>\n

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I removed one of them in this version of the image and I like it better. To my eye two catch lights were distracting. If they had both been from natural sources I wouldn’t have removed either one.<\/p>\n

Probably…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

Note: I keep coming back to those stubby little legs of the kingfisher, especially in the first photo. In the past I’ve read that they’re as short as they are as an adaptation for digging and then spending so much time in their nesting burrows\u00a0on the sides of vertical mud banks.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Plus my strategy for dealing with double catch lights in the eye.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53113,"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],"tags":[953,2329,3385,3636,146,211,994,3089,3637,2738,311],"class_list":["post-53112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belted-kingfishers","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","tag-alula","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-ceryle-alcyon","tag-double-catch-light-cause","tag-flight","tag-male","tag-rouse","tag-salt-lake-county","tag-short-legs","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/belted-kingfisher-0139-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dOE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53112","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=53112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}