SANDHILL CRANES

Our subdivision includes both woods and ponds.  As a result, we are blessed with a variety of birds.  Of course, the geese are not welcome, and we have found ways to discourage them.  But we also have our share of other birds, including wild turkeys and cranes.  This morning as I was coming home from my daily walk I almost ran into a couple of sandhill cranes that were loitering in the doorway of an office building a couple of blocks from our house.  The cranes didn't seem wary of my presence, which seemed unusual to me.  In any event, as soon as I got home I grabbed my camera and returned to catch some shots of the cranes.

The cranes were still there and seemed to be in no hurry to leave.  I began taking pictures from about 30 feet away and worked my way closer, ending within 8-10 feet of the birds.  I would up taking perhaps 50 shots and kept 5 of them.

The first is of one of the cranes that standing one one leg.

One of the drawbacks to this set of shots is that the background was an office building.  I was using my 70-300 mm lens to get as much reach as possible.  I opened up the aperture as far as I could to isolate the birds from the background.  That works better the closer the camera is to the subjects.  In this first shot the background remains something of a distraction.  As I moved closer, I was able to reduce that problem.

This second shot is not great, as the bird was looking away, but I did like how I caught the curve of the crane's neck.

The next is a classic profile shot from the neck up.

I was pleased with the overall resolution of this shot, which I shot at an ISO of 400 and an aperture of f/5.6.  The shutter speed was a quick 1/1000 second. The lens was all the way to a 300 mm focal length.

As I said, there were actually two cranes, which are sort of included in the following two shots.  I was focused on the nearer crane, so that the other bird was blurred out.  I thought that approach was better than trying to boost the depth of field at the cost of greater background clutter.

The composition in the latter shot is the better of the two.  I was happy to get shots with the birds in the same posture, though contrasting postures would have been nice also.

John