![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/black-necked-stilt-0739-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"black-necked-stilt-0739-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n1\/2000, 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>\nA week ago today I photographed this juvenile Black-necked Stilt performing a wing and leg stretch at Bear River MBR. It was a slow, languid stretch so I got many photos of it and in all of them the bird kept its leg tucked under the extended wing as if it was trying to prevent a sunburned leg.<\/p>\n
Even though the plumage patterns of young juveniles like this are similar to those of adults the immature birds are easily distinguished from adults because the dark feathers of their upperparts have buff-brown margins, creating a scalloped effect that the adults lack.<\/p>\n
\n- Tip for beginning photographers: A photo like this can be difficult to level accurately during processing because there are few cues in the image to indicate true level (there’s no horizon for example). In this case I used the tip of the longest toe on the right foot and the reflection of that same toe that can barely be seen in the bottom right corner of the image. A straight line drawn between the two should be perfectly vertical. It wasn’t in the original image so I leveled it (the steps involved in actually leveling an image depend on what processing software you’re using). \u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/black-necked-stilt-0523c-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"black-necked-stilt-0523c-ron-dudley\\"")
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1\/2000, 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>\nHere’s the same bird foraging for food in some of the very little water available this year in that part of the refuge. While I was processing this photo and paying attention to detail the more time I spent on the process the more I liked the image, even though the photo didn’t jump out at me at first. Here’s some of the details that appeal to me:<\/p>\n
\n- The angled light on the dorsal darks really highlights the scalloping of the feather edges of the juvenile.<\/li>\n
- The setting may not be beautiful but it’s typical feeding habitat for the species and that always appeals to me. I like the sprigs of emerging green vegetation at bottom left and I even think the stick below the bird’s bill adds to the image.<\/li>\n
- I enjoy the raised-foot pose and the water drop clinging to the bill.<\/li>\n
- With the whites and near-blacks of the bird in full sun this was a difficult exposure and I think I nailed it.<\/li>\n
- But more than anything I like the series of circular water disturbances that decrease in size from left to right in the direction the bird is looking and traveling. To me they almost seem as if they’re pointing the way for both the bird’s direction of travel and the viewer’s eye as it passes over the image.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Ok, enough personal image analysis on my part. Each viewer will have their own opinion and for some the image may seem pretty pedestrian and that’s perfectly fine. But I’m not one of them.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plus an image-leveling tip for beginning photographers.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73577,"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":[338,6,334,708,392],"tags":[49,705,707,3358,4629,768,190,4630],"class_list":["post-73575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge-favorite-locations","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-black-necked-stilts","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-black-necked-stilt","tag-himantopus-mexicanus","tag-how-to-level-an-image","tag-image-analysis","tag-immature","tag-juvenile","tag-photo-processing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/black-necked-stilt-0739-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-j8H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73575","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=73575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}