Just illustrating one of the common pitfalls of nature photography.
The other day while I was up in the bathroom observing the ducks (which sounds weird if you haven’t been following along,) a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) was hopping excitedly between a couple of trees in relatively plain sight, and I say “relatively” because there is no completely plain sight on the trees in the backyard. Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) are notorious for throwing out lots of thin little branches in every direction, and these get in the way more often than not.
This was among the first of the frames, showing how much stuff lies in between, which makes autofocus get very spastic, unsure of what it should be locking onto, and so it very often jumps around, back and forth. Meanwhile, the woodpeckers are typically rather hyperactive and twitchy, never holding still for longer than a literal half-second, so switching to manual focus would be extremely demanding and likely no better.
This is a male, by the way, as evidenced by that red cheek patch, but a female came a little closer and so the rest of the images are of her.
Might have been sharp enough – look at the feet – but her motion wrecked the frame. One of the few that had the sunlight hitting her eye for a catchlight, too. Most of what you see here I’m not even going to keep, along with a whole lot of other frames – I shot 77 in the few minutes she was cavorting around on this side of the trees.
Sharp, not bad, I can live with the little twig getting in there, but an odd pose and not a very good portrait. Figures.
I left this one full-frame to show that I didn’t have to crop a lot, but more so you can see the conditions. However, this is early spring and the cypress have not started budding out yet – in high summer, she wouldn’t have been visible at all, or at least not more than a fraction, and I probably would have been trying to get underneath her for a clearer view, which would have made me obvious and so she probably wouldn’t have gone for that.
Tight crop, sharp enough (not perfect,) though not a great pose – but we can see the tongue rooting into a crevice in the bark, so there’s that at least. And a damn branch.
Action shot while hopping to another branch, looking like a comic strip character that got a sudden shock – I should have dubbed in some exclamation points over her head…
Annnnddd this is about as good as it got; pretty good focus, a bit of sky shine on the eye even though it lacked a good catchlight, decent light, dynamic pose – and twigs. This is the kind of frame that makes me think, Well, I could dub them out in GIMP, but then debate whether that counts as cheating in my own personal standards of acceptable nature photography. I much prefer to get them right in-camera, and we see pileateds often enough here that it’s not like this was my only opportunity.
But yeah, one of them fancy cameras where I could just say, “pileated woodpecker,” and the autofocus would know what it should be locking onto would be great. Oh, they don’t have them yet? And they would cost several thousand dollars if they did? And that still wouldn’t get the intervening branches out of the way? And speaking the subject out loud might send them off anyway? I guess I better learn to live with the present shortcomings – that’s part of the challenge and skillset, right? I’ll keep telling myself that…