{"id":97843,"date":"2021-05-03T05:31:22","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T11:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=97843"},"modified":"2021-05-03T08:18:08","modified_gmt":"2021-05-03T14:18:08","slug":"my-most-successful-great-blue-heron-flight-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/03\/my-most-successful-great-blue-heron-flight-series\/","title":{"rendered":"My Most Successful Great Blue Heron Flight Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Most successful” because I got more sharp shots than I’ve ever managed to get in a single flight series in the past and because several of them are among my favorite photos of the species, in flight or not.<\/p>\n

All photos below are presented in the order they were taken but there’s big ‘skips’ between some of them.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Five days ago at Bear River MBR I was attempting to photograph other birds at a spot where one of the canals opens up into a more expansive area of open water when this Great Blue Heron unexpectedly came skimming in over the phrags..<\/p>\n

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‘His’ apparent intention was to land near the water’s edge but I think the presence of my pickup made him a little nervous so he altered his flight path several times which gave me more time than usual with him in my viewfinder.<\/p>\n

In the early shots in the series I had the dark Promontory Mountains in the background and golden phrag plumes anchoring the heron at the bottom of the frame so some of those photos are my favorites. Here the phrags are mostly out of focus but…<\/p>\n

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four shots in the burst later they were sharp. This is the single photo from the series I posted four days ago.<\/p>\n

Occasionally in a series I get two shots where the flight postures of the bird are so much alike they look like carbon copies. That’s what happened with this photo and the previous one, even though there were three other photos between them. I had to look really hard to find any difference between their flight postures and the only difference I found was pretty insignificant.<\/p>\n

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With his wings in the up position it’s his right wing whose ventral surface is shaded instead of his left.<\/p>\n

After this photo he pulled a flight maneuver on me which caused clipped wings and a soft bird for a while but 31 shots later in the burst I managed to…<\/p>\n

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get everything under control again. But by now the background consisted of blue sky and a few subtle white clouds instead of mountains. In this shot his banking flight posture allows a good look at his entire dorsal surface.<\/p>\n

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For the next few shots we get only a hint of the golden phrags at the…<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>bottom of the frame.<\/p>\n

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Now he’s banking again.<\/p>\n

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I completely lost the phrags at the bottom of the frame for a while and in an effort to keep some of them in frame…<\/p>\n

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I nearly clipped a wing on this next shot.<\/p>\n

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In some ways I’d have been better off if I hadn’t been using my teleconverter which would have allowed me to keep more of the phrags in the frame and avoid clipping body parts in so many photos. On the flip side using the teleconverter made the heron larger in the frame and gave me better detail.<\/p>\n

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In this shot I like the asymmetry of his flight posture.<\/p>\n

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I’ll close with the photo in the series that I think best shows the primitive appearance that Great Blue Herons are known for.<\/p>\n

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I really gave my old Canon 7D Mark II camera a workout on this series. In the eight seconds I had the heron in my viewfinder I took 79 photos of him. I clipped body parts in 32 of them and another 13 photos were soft but that still leaves me with 34 sharp shots with no clipped or cut off body parts.<\/p>\n

The way I look at it a batting average of .430 isn’t bad for an old man with marginal eyesight and an old camera.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n