{"id":60068,"date":"2018-06-11T04:02:38","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T10:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=60068"},"modified":"2018-06-11T05:03:13","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T11:03:13","slug":"mountain-bluebirds-presumably-a-mated-pair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/11\/mountain-bluebirds-presumably-a-mated-pair\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountain Bluebirds – Presumably A Mated Pair"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get decent shots of Mountain Bluebirds so it\u00a0was great fun to photograph both a male and a female in the Wasatch Mountains yesterday morning. It was cool and a little windy up there so I expected most of the birds to be hunkered down to escape the wind but I was pleasantly surprised to find several cooperative subjects out in the open.<\/p>\n

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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

This female Mountain Bluebird had some difficulty maintaining her perch in the wind so several times she had to open her wings and spread her tail to stay on the perch. She would sometimes stretch her neck far forward into the wind like this and in my experience that was a little unusual. I suspect she was trying to make her wind profile more streamlined.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

She flew to several nearby perches\u00a0where she continued to have the wind and balance\u00a0problem at each one but her reactions to the wind gave me some nice looks at her colors.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, 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

When she gave up on this perch I caught her at takeoff.<\/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

One of her next landing spots was more cluttered, as were several others I’m not including here.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Once she flew down and landed on the edge of the gravel road to hunt for insects. A few seconds after this shot was taken she snatched up and gobbled down an insect that appeared to be a millipede but I didn’t get a great look at the prey because those photos were soft.<\/p>\n

This was one of those times when it really paid off to have my shorter zoom lens (attached to another camera) sitting\u00a0right next to me in my pickup. She had landed so close to me that I couldn’t fit all of her in the frame with my big lens so I just reached over and grabbed the\u00a0smaller one. It was perfect for the situation and it only took about 2 seconds to make the switch.<\/p>\n

That “baby lens” has saved my bacon multiple times recently.<\/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

The much more colorful male, probably her mate, was hanging around nearby and after she left the road I was able to get a few shots of him. The intensity of those blues always blows me away. He’s so intensely\u00a0colorful it may look like I’ve added saturation during processing but of course I haven’t.<\/p>\n

As I sometimes do I wondered about the horizontal composition of this version of the image because of the vertical perch so just for the hell of it…<\/p>\n

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I tried another option.<\/p>\n

After some pondering I think I figured out which version I prefer but it took a while…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get decent shots of Mountain Bluebirds so it was great fun to photograph both a male and a female in the Wasatch Mountains yesterday morning. <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60074,"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":[6,334,1504],"tags":[137,211,741,1505,318],"class_list":["post-60068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-mountain-bluebirds","tag-female","tag-male","tag-mountain-bluebird","tag-sialia-currocoides","tag-wasatch-mountains"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/mountain-bluebird-8514-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-fCQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60068","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=60068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}