{"id":83785,"date":"2020-04-09T06:16:32","date_gmt":"2020-04-09T12:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=83785"},"modified":"2020-04-09T07:33:15","modified_gmt":"2020-04-09T13:33:15","slug":"yesterday-was-a-turkey-vulture-kind-of-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/09\/yesterday-was-a-turkey-vulture-kind-of-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday Was A Turkey Vulture Kind Of Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Turkey Vultures have been gone for far too long and I’ve missed having them around.<\/p>\n

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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>\n

I’m very limited where I can go these days so yesterday morning I ventured out into a remote area of northern Utah. Turkey Vultures were my reward. This one and a buddy of “his” were perched at the corner of a decrepit old fence. They were wary of my pickup when I first approached but…<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 400mm,\u00a0 not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

they soon settled down into some typical Turkey Vulture behavior.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 164mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This personal hygiene-challenged bird was perched just a few feet away from the first one.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 164 mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/p>\n

I backed off with my smaller zoom lens for a few shots that included both vultures but I’ll be damned if I could get both birds to look my way at the same time.<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, 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

At one point this vulture struck some pretty unique head and neck poses. It may look like he was in the process of preening but that wasn’t the case – he seemed to be looking at my pickup the entire time. I had to wonder if it was some form of parallaxing unique to vultures but that’s only a guess..<\/p>\n

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1\/1600, f\/7.1, 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

At one point his shenanigans very nearly caused him to fall off his perch.<\/p>\n

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1\/1250, f\/9, 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<\/p>\n

We found these two vultures further down the road. For those readers like me who are so neurotic you simply have<\/em> to know what the metal sign says before you can move on…<\/p>\n

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here’s a “flipped” version of the same image to make it easier to read. Flipping the photo makes it look very different doesn’t it. I purposely included my copyright watermark in the flipping process so its “mirror image” effect could be even better appreciated.<\/p>\n

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Flipping a photo makes it look different enough from the original that cheaters in photo contests sometimes use the technique to make their cheating less obvious. I was once inadvertantly drawn into just such a controversy and it wasn’t any fun. A local bird photographer (I’ll call him “Donald”) entered a national wildlife photo contest and one of his images won first place. But the contest had rules limiting where photos that were entered in the contest could be taken and Donald’s photo didn’t qualify for the contest because it was taken elsewhere.<\/p>\n

But Donald lied about where his photo was taken. Other photographers including yours truly took almost identical photos of the same birds at the same time but Donald used several deceptive and dishonest techniques to disguise where and when his photo was taken, including flipping the image, and his photo won first place in the contest. By the time contest organizers and sponsors discovered the deception the cash prize had already been awarded and they apparently believed it was too late to do much of anything about it.<\/p>\n

The end result – Donald was awarded first place and basked in the national limelight and the second place photographer from Wyoming who had entered a beautiful porcupine image was robbed of both the prestige and the $5000 first place prize. There’s much more to the story but at this point at least I’m just not prepared to fully open that can of worms in public.<\/p>\n

But here’s my point. Flipping a photo can make it look so different from the original as to be almost unrecognizable, especially when the photo has less symmetry than this one.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Turkey Vultures have been gone for far too long and I’ve missed having them around.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83787,"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":[6,334,16,910],"tags":[912,4570,5038,3163,5037,911,311],"class_list":["post-83785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-photography-ethics","category-turkey-vultures","tag-cathartes-aura","tag-cheating-in-photo-contests","tag-flipping-photos","tag-mirror-image","tag-photo-contest-ethics","tag-turkey-vulture","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/turkey-vulture-7834-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-lNn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83785","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=83785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}