1\/1600, 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>\nI photographed this juvenile White-crowned Sparrow two days ago in the Wasatch Mountains.\u00a0It had been feeding on and near a brush pile so the setting is busy but personally I think the natural setting and some of the early fall colors in the background make up for it.<\/p>\n
I had this bird in my view finder less than a minute after I stopped my pickup at the pile and I’d been photographing a house wren immediately after stopping so I hadn’t yet had time to adjust my camera to the “best” settings possible to get the kind of shots I hoped for when I spotted this sparrow. Readers know I’m nearly always lusting after takeoff, flight and action shots and because little birds are so damned fast you need oodles of shutter speed to get them sharp, especially their wings.<\/p>\n
I believe a SS\u00a0in the range of 1\/3200\u00a0to 1\/5000 gives me the best chance to do that\u00a0(although there are plenty of variables that can\u00a0occasionally allow for sharp\u00a0flight shots of small birds\u00a0at slower SS’s). In this low, early morning\u00a0light the 1\/1600\u00a0SS I had wouldn’t normally be fast enough to get those buzz-saw wings sharp – instead they would have motion blur and even though some folks don’t mind motion blur in the wings I generally\u00a0don’t share that view if I have a choice.<\/p>\n
But once I had the sparrow in my viewfinder and realized\u00a0it was at just about the right distance for takeoff\/flight shots it was too late to change my ISO and\/or aperture\u00a0to get more SS because I knew the bird would likely\u00a0take off during the process so I just fired off a few bursts and hoped I’d get extremely lucky and catch the bird at takeoff and things would somehow work out. In other words it was a classic Hail Mary situation.<\/p>\n
I did get lucky, in at least\u00a0four ways.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/white-crowned-sparrow-7221-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"white-crowned-sparrow-7221-ron-dudley\\"")
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1\/1600, 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>\nI adore this takeoff posture. It’s one I very rarely (as in dang near never)\u00a0get of small birds, even under ideal conditions. It almost looks like a wing stretch, but believe me it isn’t – in a nanosecond the sparrow was gone. I won’t go into detail about why I love this posture so much and of course you’ll have to decide for yourself how you feel about it. But considering my tastes I was very lucky to get it and here’s the\u00a0four reasons why:<\/p>\n
\n- The sparrow actually took off during one of my bursts – usually they don’t. I’d estimate that only happens about 5% of the time with small birds,\u00a0probably less (yes, I “waste” a lot of shots).<\/em><\/li>\n
- Normally this shutter speed wouldn’t have been nearly fast enough to prevent motion blur in the wings. But I was extremely lucky to get the wings at or very near\u00a0the apex of their upstroke – between going up and going down – so they’re moving slowly enough that they’re plenty sharp.<\/em><\/li>\n
- For this particular shot in the burst my shutter fired at the exact moment necessary to get my most desired takeoff posture for a songbird at this angle. What are the chances of that happening? The wing speed of a typical sparrow is about 15 beats\/second for a full rotation\u00a0and the burst rate of my camera\u00a0is 10 frames\/sec – you do the math.<\/em><\/li>\n
- All the above\u00a0had to come together in the same shot<\/em> for me to pull it off. To be honest I don’t take much credit for that because much of it was pure, dumb luck but if you try often enough\u00a0Lady\u00a0Luck\u00a0has a way of eventually making an appearance.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
But not everything worked out. I hate that white twig just below the bird’s beak. It’s too bright and partly because of its position so close to the face\u00a0it’s distracting.<\/p>\n
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This is what I wish the image really looked like but sadly it doesn’t. Obviously I cloned out the twig for this version of the image.<\/p>\n
All of which\u00a0brings to mind\u00a0one of my bird photography mantras – ” Good bird photography ain’t easy”. Which is why so many supposed “nature” photographers cheat but that’s a subject for another post.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
Late addendum: In a late comment on this post Mikal Deese made the following observation:<\/em><\/p>\n\n- “Imagined it without that too light poky stick when I saw that it completed a pinwheel of four sticks that centered around the bird. When appreciated that way, the erasure looks like something is missing. I\u2019d like to try toning down the offending stick, so it more matched the other. Now that\u2019s an amazingly fortuitous composition!”<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So I decided to try it (below). I think it’s now much less distracting and Mikal has a point about the “pinwheel” effect. Thanks for the suggestion, Mikal.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/white-crowned-sparrow-7221c-ron-dudley.jpg\")
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Except for a seemingly small but very aggravating detail this second photo might have been among my favorite songbird shots of all time, largely because of degree of difficulty and four unlikely strokes of good luck.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63189,"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":[6,334,16,350],"tags":[1940,190,282,2738,311,325,1663],"class_list":["post-63186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-photography-ethics","category-white-crowned-sparrows","tag-bird-photography-technique","tag-juvenile","tag-shutter-speed","tag-takeoff","tag-utah-2","tag-white-crowned-sparrow","tag-zonotrichia-leucophrys"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/white-crowned-sparrow-7221b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gr8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63186","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=63186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/white-crowned-sparrow-7215-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"white-crowned-sparrow-7215-ron-dudley\\"")
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