{"id":73396,"date":"2019-07-13T06:18:31","date_gmt":"2019-07-13T12:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=73396"},"modified":"2019-07-13T07:48:35","modified_gmt":"2019-07-13T13:48:35","slug":"american-avocet-takeoff-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/13\/american-avocet-takeoff-series\/","title":{"rendered":"American Avocet Takeoff Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting three takeoff shots in a series like this is pretty unusual for me, especially since I didn’t clip any body parts. Yesterday was mostly<\/em> a good day at Bear River MBR but I saw some very disturbing conditions while I was there.<\/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

I had stopped for a group of avocets mostly because there was a couple of chicks among them I wanted to photograph but in the end it was my photos of this adult taking off that I was most pleased with, in part because of their degree of difficulty. Thankfully I had already removed my teleconverter when it took off because otherwise I’d have had no chance to avoid clipping or cutting off body parts.<\/p>\n

These three photos are sequential shots in a burst with no skips.<\/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 is my favorite shot in the short series. In particular I like the wing position, the water column being pulled up and forward by the feet and the sharpness of the entire bird. My ridiculously fast shutter speed contributed to the wing sharpness of course but I was still pleasantly surprised to have enough depth of field to get both wings sharp considering how close I was to the bird and my aperture of f\/6.3.<\/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

In some ways this is my luckiest shot of the series even though I like the previous photo better. As you can see by the vegetation that now appears in the frame at right I was panning (moving the camera\/lens horizontally) when I took this shot and I was still able to keep the entire bird in the frame and maintain its sharpness. More often than not in this situation I’ll clip body parts or lose sharp focus on the bird. Or both.<\/p>\n

I’m not particularly happy with the vegetation in front of the bird in the last shot or all the bubbles on the water surface that appear as dark blobs in the top half of the frame but I can live with them. What I couldn’t live with was the tip of a twig sticking out of the water directly behind the bird in the first two shots so I removed them. I rarely make those kinds of alterations to my images but when I do I always disclose what I’ve done.<\/p>\n

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I used the caveat “mostly” in my opening paragraph for a reason. Yesterday was largely a good day at the refuge. I had several opportunities with birds in flight and I photographed chicks and juveniles of several species but I was deeply concerned by the conditions I saw at the refuge. Even though we’ve had a banner water year so far here in northern Utah the refuge was almost as dry as a bone in many areas resulting in far fewer birds than usual this time of year, in part because of fewer nesting opportunities for birds. Agriculture and industry upstream on the Bear River are using so much water there isn’t enough left for the refuge. And the state of Utah, in their infinite wisdom, is moving forward with plans for more dams on the upper Bear River which will prevent even more water from reaching the refuge in the future.<\/p>\n

Much of the refuge today looks more like a large ranch than it does a bird refuge. Cows on the refuge are controlled by many miles of electric fence and large impoundments are dry and growing vegetation where birds used to nest and feed in and on the water.<\/p>\n

What I saw yesterday was deeply disturbing. I’m afraid that “Bear River Ranch” is becoming a more appropriate name for the refuge than Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Getting three takeoff shots in a series like this is pretty unusual for me, especially since I didn’t clip any body parts. Yesterday was mostly a good day at Bear River MBR but I saw some very disturbing conditions while I was there.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73398,"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":[381,338,334,8],"tags":[27,49,146,471,2738],"class_list":["post-73396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-avocets","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","tag-american-avocet","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-flight","tag-recurvirostra-americana","tag-takeoff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/american-avocet-0913-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-j5O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73396","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=73396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}