Belted Kingfisher
Nov, 2016Views
3310
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Awards
Runner Up in The Food Chain Photo Contest
Contest Finalist in The Food Chain Photo Contest
Peer Award
Magnificent Capture
Absolute Masterpiece
Superb Composition
Superior Skill
Top Choice
Outstanding Creativity
All Star
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Twilightgirl
March 02, 2017
Would love to know how you managed to capture this beautiful image. I have some good shots of belted kingfishers, but they are skittish and Id love to get better at capturing them. Great image.
Platinum
Platinum
Pjerry
March 02, 2020
So sharp, From which planet are you coming from?
Super Deanne, what a pleasure to see your gallery.
Super Deanne, what a pleasure to see your gallery.
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photograph was taken from a blind at a small pond in eastern Florida. Belted Kingfishers are notoriously difficult to approach for close up photography and I'd never before had any success with this species. I'm from New Hampshire and made a trip to Florida to work with a knowledgeable wildlife biologist who set up the workshop and we were lucky that this handsome male Kingfisher graced us with his presence and proceeded to dive for fish in front of us.Time
In order to be able to photograph this bird we were up well before dawn and were installed in our one man blinds before the sun came up. The bird never saw the humans enter or leave the blinds. The bird showed up on his perch around sunrise and hunted on and off for several hours. The Kingfisher left our location around 11:00AM and we were then able to get up and out before the bird returned later in the day.Lighting
We were fortunate to have good, morning sunshine to give us adequate light for the high shutter speeds necessary to capture this kind of action. This was ISO 3200, 600mm, f/8 at 1/1250 sec. taken at 9:05AMEquipment
This image was taken with a Canon 7DII with a Canon 600mm f/4 IS II telephoto mounted on a Wimberly Gimbal Head on Gitzo carbon fiber tripodInspiration
I've been an avid bird photographer for more than ten years now and I've always wanted to be able to catch detail and movement that you just can't observe with the naked eye or even with binoculars. I've always loved Kingfishers and have wanted to capture one of these unique birds while hunting and diving for fish for a very long time. As I said earlier, these birds are a challenge to approach and photograph and the difficulty level just made me more determined to succeed. I found a great naturalist/biologist who was offering a unique and limited opportunity to come and photograph this bird and I jumped at the chance. I was fortunate that the this male Kingfisher showed up as we'd hoped and I was able to get some nice images. The bird has since stopped coming in to this pond so I was extremely lucky to have the opportunity.Editing
The amount of post-processing I do on an image depends on what the subject matter is. I tend to use HDR for my landscape photography but the bird photographs only get minimal processing, resizing, sharpening, sometimes a bit of cloning to removed branches or other unnecessary objects that detract from the subject matter. For this shot I adjusted the light levels in LightRoom then opened the image in Corel Photo-Paint, masked the bird and applied unsharp mask to the bird only then reversed the mask and removed some noise in the BG. I also added a bit of canvas to the upper frame on this image because the bird's head was extremely close to the edge of frame and the extra canvas gave the subject more room in the frame.In my camera bag
I usually travel with my 1Ds MKIII and 7DII camera bodies. My go to bird lens is my Canon 600mm f/4 IS II telephoto. I also have a Canon 24/105 f/4 Is, Canon 100/400 f/5.6, canon 100mm macro lenses. I also carry 1.4 and 2x extenders, flash, ring flash for macro work, extension tubes, filters, cable release and of course extra batteries (charged) and memory cards. I also carry a flashlight and headlamp because you never know when you'll be walking around getting set up in the dark before the sun comes up or after it goes down......Feedback
It's very helpful to find a good wildlife photographer who knows where there are good photographic opportunities and sign up for a workshop. If you don't have the ability to do that you need to scout out a Kingfisher and observe it's normal hunting routine and get yourself in an unobtrusive location preferably a blind, before the bird shows up for the day and wait. Once in the blind, I found these birds are so incredibly fast the best way to catch this bird emerging from the water was to observe his diving habits and pre-focus on the area he's likely to dive and be ready to start shooting the instant you see him beginning his dive. Patience, patience and more patience and practice. I spent about eight hours in a blind over the course of a couple days and only got this one shot of the bird emerging from the water that I was happy with. But this shot was one of the last I got in over eight hours of watching and photographing the bird. The longer I observed its habits the closer I got to getting what I wanted for an image. And of course, a bit of luck doesn't hurt either!
