This past few days I have been shooting American Avocets at the height of their breeding and activity season in Palo Alto Baylands nature preserve, California. Combination of light and BG offers unique opportunities here. My main focus was habitat and behavior in breeding season. During mating, Avocets protect their breeding ground ferociously, fending off great egrets, snowies, ibises and even get into dog fights with black-necked stilts. Of course when the harriers approach they have no second thought about leaving ;) The great egrets often put up no resistance and prefer getting about their business of hunting. But snowies are more naughty. This guy landed in Avocet territory and was immediately surrounded by 3 defenders, they dive aiming for the head to scare the snowy but once they were on the ground snowy fights back trying to jump on them!
This is one frame that shows the interaction, notice the high breeding plumage.
This photo was difficult to get since both of the birds need the right pose at the same time and focus needs be perfect, it happens in a split second. Here I took the TC off for maximum AF speed and also to fit both birds in the frame, I grabbed pre-focus on incoming Avocet before landing and locked AF using AF-ON button and then released just before pressing shutter, 5D locked instantly and here is the result. I used -2/3 EV to protect the subtle tones in the whites and f/8 aperture to maximize dof for both birds.
Canon 5D MKII and 500 f/4 at f/8, 1/1600sec ISO 400: sw: Canon DPP, I ran selective NR on BG to blur distracting elements (image had no visible noise)
Here is a larger version to see the fidelity and details of this image. I will post more Avocet flight shots this week.