Trophy Shot or Why Backgrounds Matter

This photo was taken in the "statue" yard. That is the yard where I thought I was looking at a statue. If you are a birder and you would like to take a photo of a rare sighting, you probably take the shot no matter what is in the background since what you are after is visual proof of the bird you sighted. But if you are a photographer, backgrounds matter. Here, you can see that, yes, it is indeed a trophy shot of a Sandhill Crane.  The background is a little distracting, however.

The nice thing about the longer telephotos is that they have a very narrow angle of view. Of the 180 degrees you can see from your far left hand to your far right hand, the telephoto only can cover about six degrees, a very narrow slice.  While at times that can be a negative, it can also be a positive characteristic. On the upside it means that a subject can be fairly easily isolated.  Even a small move of a few feet or readjustment of the camera angle can result in a totally different - and perhaps less distracting - background.

If you compare this photo with the last one, you will see that the crane hasn't really moved. I have moved the lens slightly to include the road in the background to illustrate how close the crane would get to the road because, even when cars went whizzing by, it seemed completely ambivalent about it. These were also taken on some one's lawn, but by taking a little care in choosing the background, you would never know it - except for the cultivated lawn.

If the crane had been frightened by the car, it would not have it's head down foraging in the earth. Most birds see cars as less of a threat than a person on foot. That is why there are places where you can view birds but you have to stay inside your car. I was able to move within about fifty feet of the crane, but any time I moved, I waited until it wasn't looking and when it would look, I would freeze until it went back to eating. My telephoto is not a zoom lens, so to fill the frame with the bird, I had to zoom with my feet to get closer.

Cranes and herons are not in the same bird family, but there is some superficial commonality - long legs, long necks, long bills. Like all birds, they can fluff their feathers.  Great Blue Herons will do this after getting wet when they are trying to shake off water.  I don't know why the crane was doing this.  It wasn't raining and it wasn't wet. You can change the angle, but there isn't much you can do about a driveway. I'll post more tomorrow.