I suspect many of my readers are as discouraged and enraged by events related to the election as I am this morning. I’m hoping that what I think is a pretty wonderful photo of a handsome young shrike in flight will provide us all with a brief respite from what I consider to be a potential national tragedy in the making (at 3:15 AM the morning after the election). As much as possible I try to avoid both politics and religion on Feathered Photography so this is the last I’ll say on the subject but I felt I couldn’t and shouldn’t avoid it completely. Sometimes the elephant in the room simply can’t be ignored.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n
Back in the summer of 2013 Feathered Photography was on life support for weeks due to issues with my inaccurately named hosting provider, Network Solutions. My blog wouldn’t load for readers or it loaded so slowly that most folks just gave up and the editing page acted the same way for me when I was trying to compose a post. Feathered Photography was actually offline for nine days before a solution was found by moving to a more competent and responsive hosting provider.<\/p>\n
One of the photos I posted when we were still limping along was a Loggerhead Shrike in flight that became my favorite flight shot of that species but relatively few readers were able to see it because of my hosting issues. I’ve always wanted to reprocess that image in a way I like better and repost it.<\/p>\n
Today’s the day.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/loggerhead-shrike-1153-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"loggerhead-shrike-1153-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 500, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II US, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nThe photo was taken on July 6, 2013 on Antelope Island as the juvenile shrike took off from sagebrush. Given my personal tastes it would be hard to improve much on this shot because I like the inclusion of appropriate habitat, the background, the flight pose, the even light on the shrike, the placement of the bird in the frame, there’s a nice catch light in the eye and the shrike is sharp.<\/p>\n
This version of the photo has been cropped to 5×7. Previously I had cropped it to a different aspect ratio that I don’t like quite as well.<\/p>\n
I wish shrikes on the island were as common as they used to be but like so many other birds they’ve taken a hit in recent years. Hopefully they’ll make a comeback.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m hoping my favorite photo of a Loggerhead Shrike in flight will provide readers with a brief respite from the stresses of the election.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90998,"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":[3,334,346],"tags":[31,4618,146,5441,409,206,1372,5442,311],"class_list":["post-90997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-aspect-ratio","tag-flight","tag-hosting-provider","tag-lanius-ludovicianus","tag-loggerhead-shrike","tag-network-solutions","tag-respite-from-the-election","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/loggerhead-shrike-1153-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-nFH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90997","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=90997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}