![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/black-billed-magpie-5725-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"black-billed-magpie-5725-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, 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>\nAnd this is it. A whole host of difficult objectives were accomplished with\u00a0this photo, including:<\/p>\n
\n- the magpie, all of it, is sharp<\/li>\n
- there’s nesting material in its bill<\/li>\n
- the background is clean instead of cluttered (although I’m not fond of its color, can hardly wait to get some spring greens back there)<\/li>\n
- I got an excellent slight\u00a0head turn to put light and detail in most of the blacks of the face and\u00a0give me a catch light in the eye<\/li>\n
- I love the flight posture as the bird begins to flare in order to land on the nest directly in front of it<\/li>\n
- the\u00a0tail is tipped toward me allowing a great view of\u00a0its spectacular\u00a0length and shape when\u00a0flared<\/li>\n
- the right wing is in the down position\u00a0which in my view nicely complements our look at the tail<\/li>\n
- and perhaps most\u00a0significantly,\u00a0during\u00a0the split second this photo was taken\u00a0the light angle on the magpie was perfect to produce expansive iridescence on both the wing and the tail, even producing a few prismatic colors toward the bottom of the tail<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
That’s a lot of things to go right when each one of them is difficult to achieve.<\/p>\n
But dammit, I clipped a few pixels off of the end of the longest tail feather!<\/em> For me that largely ruins the shot. Yes, I could “repair” that feather during processing but I simply will not clone body parts of birds (although I did add a narrow strip of canvas at the top of the frame).<\/p>\nMagpies are one of the most difficult species I photograph, in part because of\u00a0their extremely long tail. I have to constantly be aware of its length when framing the shot or I clip it or cut it off and it goes without saying that proper framing becomes infinitely more difficult when the\u00a0bird’s in flight.<\/p>\n
A photo like this one inspires me because it shows me what’s possible but that doesn’t take the pain away when I screw it up.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A photo like this one inspires me because it shows me what’s possible but that doesn’t take the pain away when I screw it up.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57256,"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":[3,6,334,363,16,391],"tags":[57,2969,865,126,146,186,231,610,3895,311],"class_list":["post-57255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-black-billed-magpies","category-photography-ethics","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-black-billed-magpie","tag-building-nests","tag-cloning","tag-ethics","tag-flight","tag-iridescence","tag-nesting-material","tag-pica-hudsonia","tag-prismatic-colors","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/black-billed-magpie-5725-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-eTt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57255","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=57255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}