Red-winged Blackbird — Takeoff and in Flight

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I spent two and one-half days exploring the Cheyenne Bottoms WA and Quivira NWR-Big Salt Marsh in Kansas last week. These wetlands are premier sites for viewing shorebirds in the interior United States, especially in the spring. I expected to spend most of my time there photographing shorebirds, as I has done on a visit a couple of years ago. The shorebirds were there, as recent E-bird reports indicated. But the water levels were low and most of the shorebirds, visible using spotting scopes, were a long distance from the dikes and roads accessible to viewers.

Red-winged Blackbird - Cheyenne Bottoms WA - May 2021

The 5 images in this post were obtained using the Olympus E-M1X camera
with 150-400mm f4.5 TC lens @ 250mm.
Settings were the same: 1/2000 sec at f/6.3, ISO 800

The edges of the dikes and roads were not devoid of birds. Swallows, Blackbirds, Dickcissels, Kingbirds, Meadowlarks, and Grackles were active, but skitish because of the low traffic density in these wetlands. I decided to devote my effort to trying to capture takeoff and flight images of the birds active on the edges of the areas accessible to visitors instead of the distant shorebirds.

One reason for this decision (in addition to the photographic inaccessibility of the shorebirds) was to gain experience with the Pro Capture mode available on some Olympus cameras. Pro Capture works by continuously taking images and saving them in temporary memory when the shutter is “half pressed.” The images in the buffer are deleted if the shutter is released before being fully activated. When the shutter button is fully activated, images in the buffer plus addition images collected while the shutter remains depressed are saved. While this mode captures events usually lost during the reaction time of the photographer, the photographer makes a number of decisions about camera settings that affect the outcome. Among these are choice of the field of view (how much space around the bird is included in the frame), shutter speed, number and location of the active focus points, and the aperture setting which affects the depth of field. I found myself in a situation that provided an excellent opportunity to practice using the Pro Capture mode. Doing so had been on my (should be laminated) photographic ToDo list for quite some time. Some of the results obtained are show below. More will be illustrated in follow-up blog posts.

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David Sparks

I retired in 2005 after 40 years of research and teaching at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (24 years), the University of Pennsylvania (8 years) and the Baylor College of Medicine (8 years). Photography is my retirement hobby.

Nature photography, especially bird photography, combines a number of things that I really enjoy: bird-watching, being outdoors, photography, travel, messing about with computers, and learning new skills and concepts.  I now spend much of my time engaged in these activities.

David Sibley in the preface to The Sibley Guide to Birds wrote "Birds are beautiful, in spectacular as well as subtle ways; their colors, shapes, actions, and sounds are among the most aesthetically pleasing in nature."  My goal is to acquire images that capture the beauty and uniqueness of selected species as well as images that highlight the engaging behaviors the birds exhibit.