not<\/em> have their head, eyes and ears bouncing around. If they can keep their head stable, even while hovering or hunting from an unstable perch, they have a significantly improved chance of zeroing in on prey for reasons that should be obvious. You may have held a pigeon in your hands and noticed this phenomenon. Even chickens do it. As a kid on the Montana farm I was endlessly fascinated by watching a chicken’s head remain absolutely still as I moved the rest of its body around in front of me with my hands.<\/p>\nIn a way the process and results of gaze stabilization in birds are very similar to image stabilization in many of our modern cameras and lenses.<\/p>\n
So that’s why my harrier’s head is so much sharper than the rest of its body – it was holding its head still as it hovered even though most of the rest of its body was moving more so those parts turned out soft. I think the tail is sharp because just by chance my shutter fired when it wasn’t moving. Dangling legs in a hovering harrier move a lot.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Oh, one more thing. Photographers among my readers may wonder where my active focus point was when my shutter fired. I was curious about the same thing so I used software that comes with Canon cameras (Digital Photo Professional) to find out.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/northern-harrier-7229-focus-points-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
My active focus point is the square in red (I had the rest of my points turned off.) As you can see I barely kept the harrier in frame and the active point wasn’t even (quite) on the bird. But if you’ve ever tested the focusing range of a single point as I have you know that it’s actually significantly larger than the point itself. So I believe I was locked on to the head of the bird or at least close to being locked.<\/p>\n
Some might think all this is much ado about very little but I like to understand this kind of stuff about birds and about photography. It helps me to become a better bird photographer.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It took me years to realize what saved this image. Prepare yourself for some photo and bird geekiness as I explain.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75523,"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":[338,6,334,341],"tags":[49,86,2303,146,4717,4718,1347,222,234,311],"class_list":["post-75522","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-northern-harriers","tag-bear-river-migratory-bird-refuge","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-digital-photo-professional","tag-flight","tag-gaze-stabilization","tag-head-stabilization","tag-hovering","tag-motion-blur","tag-northern-harrier","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/northern-harrier-7229-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-jE6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75522","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=75522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/northern-harrier-7229-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"northern-harrier-7229-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n