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Shorebird portrait: juvenile Black-bellied Plover.
I made a few good poratrait close-ups of shorebirds this fall, here is the first - a Black-bellied Plover. This young individual was very cooperative and allowed me to take a number of portraits with varying BGs (brown, blue, combo of both). It had been feeding before and the mud was sun-baked on his bill (wish it was clean, but sometimes you jump on such opportunities!!)
Funny story behind this picture:). I was with fellow BPN member Stephen Stephen when we spotted this guy from a good ways away. From our experience we expected this guy to flush from way too far away. Since Stephen had nothing in his files from this species and I already had some photos from previous encounters I decided to make a big circle around the bird, get low, and slowly crawl towards it in the hopes of slowly pushing it towards a waiting Stephen (who was about 50 ft from the plover). I crawled a few feet, took a picture or two, crawled again, more pictures, each time expecting it to start moving, until 10 minutes later I was within my lens' 6ft MFD...the plover having not flinched a single muscle...and Stephen still waiting 50ft away and looking discouraged at my luck:p!! I waved him over and we both got incredible close-ups of this beautiful bird.
Canon 40D + 100-400L @400mm, aperture priority, evaluative metering, 1/500s., f/8, ISO 400, +0.3 EC, natural light, handheld, FF.