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Thread: Northern Flicker, male

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    Default Northern Flicker, male

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    Well, it has been a while since I posted here, having being preoccupied with opening my Zenfolio gallery, birding and photographing Panama, and then photographing a nesting pair of Northern Flickers this spring. Here's one of the results of my efforts with the flickers. [Daniel Arias Barakat sends his greetings to you, Artie, we visited with him at length at the Canopy Lodge. I'm looking forward to seeing his Darien project.]

    06/14/11 12:12:36 PM, Dundee, OR, USA
    Canon EOS-1D Mark III
    EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM +1.4x @ 280.0mm
    Manual Exposure
    1/8000 sec, f/8.0, ISO 2000
    Evaluative Metering
    Flash External E-TTL, SYNC
    On camera Speedlite 580X II + flash extender + Speedlight 580X slave flash
    Image cropped to 4 to 5 aspect ratio for composition.

    Keeping the Red Alder snag by my back deck has paid wonderful dividends photographically this spring, and has underscored the importance of snag habitat -- it has become a virtual condominium! I felt so fortunate to have Red-breasted Sapsuckers nesting in it the last two years, and I mourned the loss of one of the two trunks this year -- waterlogged, it came crashing down one rainy night this winter.

    However, this April, a pair of Northern Flickers excavated a nest cavity in the remaining trunk, and their brood is now within about a week of fledging.

    So I've been glued to the camera, capturing images of their progress. Getting flight photos has been especially challenging. They dive from a high branch and are perched on the nest hole in a flash.

    The BG for this flight image is of necessity dark, because of the dominance of high speed flash required to minimize the motion blur of this speeding bird. I had to max out my shutter speed, use ISO 2000, and suspend a slave flash unit on a long pole about 2 m from the pre-focused subject area to get enough light on the bird.

    You're always welcome to view more of my work at http://cpmarkham.zenfolio.com

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    Marvelous image.Beautiful colors.Very nice action captured.

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    Great detail captured and thanks for sharing such a detailed account of your setup.

    Would it possible to use more flashes in a hummingbird-like setup to light the individual elements and save your ISO? I'm thinking a couple of flashes for bird/target tree, one/two for background (maybe artificial background...). Perhaps the flashes would provide enough motion freezing allowing you to come to the sync speed on shutter and reduce ISO?

    I should add, I'm not an expert in that, but the idea springs to mind!

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    Super Moderator Daniel Cadieux's Avatar
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    Very cool situation you've got going on in your backyard...it must be wonderful to observe the progress!!

    I like the landing pose you got - it's not often we see the "Red-shafted" race so it's nice to see to open wings and tail.

    I'm not an expert on flash set-ups, but I know that you can freeze the action with slower SS (and lower ISO) with flash (even with only one flash). When flash is used as main light it is the flash that freezes the action, and not the SS...but you would likely get an all-black BG this way unless you point your other flash to the BG.

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    Default Flash Setups

    Quote Originally Posted by Geoff Warnock View Post
    Great detail captured and thanks for sharing such a detailed account of your setup.

    Would it possible to use more flashes in a hummingbird-like setup to light the individual elements and save your ISO? I'm thinking a couple of flashes for bird/target tree, one/two for background (maybe artificial background...). Perhaps the flashes would provide enough motion freezing allowing you to come to the sync speed on shutter and reduce ISO?

    I should add, I'm not an expert in that, but the idea springs to mind!
    My Reply: Thanks Geoff, adding more flash units did come to mind as I worked to optimize the capture. However, these flickers, unlike hummers, are non-responsive to food enticements, and I really did want to portray the birds doing exactly what they do in their environment, without visible artifice or modification of behavior. It took a lot of head-scratching to finally get a single slave flash close enough to the birds' landing site to be useful. The nest hole is 30' above grade on a steep bank, so additional flash units to illuminate BG would have been extremely difficult to put in place and tune. The BG is pretty brushy anyway, and flashing would have made it a distraction.

    I do have some lovely soft green non-flash exposures of the identical scene taken at 1/60 sec, and I experimented with creating an HDR combo. However, the contrasting types of lighting made the bird look so freakishly pasted-in that I decided the original image was best as-is. I toned down specular reflection on the two vertical branches behind the bird to reduce distraction. The flashy appearance of my final image of course bothers me, but I did capture the position and details in the bird that I wanted. I really like the swept-back primaries behind the head.

    Daniel, Thanks for your comment as well. I have tried SS's ranging from 1/300 to 1/8000 sec. Even 1/6400 didn't minimize blur to my satisfaction. I made up for the loss of light at that speed by placing the slave as close to the bird without disturbing him. I loved the balance of the subject-BG light balance at 1/300, but the blurring was unacceptable.

    I made a video while I shot this still image, and the action is almost too fast to see in the 30fps video! It took some practice to hit the button at the magic millisecond!

    Thanks again for your thoughts. I really wanted this image to push the envelope.
    Craig
    http://cpmarkham.zenfolio.com

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    Hi Craig, great explanation, thanks!

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