FP15 Marsh Wren Building Nest, Cistothorus palustris, San Francisco Bay, CA

In April and May, if I'm not traveling, you're likely to see me lugging my big lens around Palo Alto Baylands, a Nature Preserve protecting the largest tract of undisturbed wetlands remaining in San Francisco Bay. It's an excellent place to photograph American Avocets, Black-necked Stilts, and other shore birds because they are habituated to human presence, and build their nests in salt marshes close to the Preserve's walking trails. Many of my California bird photos were made at this location.

One morning a couple of years ago I was photographing nesting Avocets from a levee trail, and kept seeing a little brown bird pick up pieces of vegetation from the marsh and taking it somewhere behind me. Since my focus was on Avocets that morning I didn't pay too much attention to the busy little bird until Avocet activity slowed mid-morning. On its next pass I followed the bird's flight and saw it land in a flowering mustard bush directly behind me. It was a Marsh Wren, and it had been collecting stalks of marsh grass to build a nest deep inside the yellow-flowered bush.

My first thought was not to even bother photographing the Wren because the image would be too 'busy' with so many leaves, branches and flowers in the way. My second thought was: what the heck, there's not much other action going on, so I might as well finish the roll and drop it off at the lab on the way home.

Since birds are used to people walking the levee trails, I was able to move to within 16 feet of the Wren - the minimum focusing distance of the 500mm f/4 lens. At that distance and widest aperture - combined with a 1.4x teleconverter - the depth of field is only about half an inch. When I focused on the Wren the surrounding vegetation blurred into beautiful abstract patches of yellow and green. Plus 2/3 of a stop exposure compensation was added to the camera's matrix meter reading to retain the bright yellow tone of the mustard flowers.

As soon as I looked through the viewfinder I realized it would be a great image, but capturing it on film was much harder than I anticipated. Since there was so much vegetation surrounding the tiny bird, and it was constantly moving around to build its nest, autofocus was essentially useless. I turned it off and tried to quickly manual focus on the eye of the bird whenever it showed in a small opening in the vegetation. Needless to say, my success rate was not high, and it was extremely frustrating to review the first few images on the light table. I can see good composition and beautiful colors, but as soon as the loupe was on the slide, I noticed the eye of the bird was soft due to mis-focus. Finally, toward the end of the roll - when the Wren had stopped briefly to sing - I was able to successfully focus on the eye to produce the image shown above.

The lesson I learned from making this memorable photo is that our pre-conceived notions can sometimes prevent us from making an exceptional photograph. I almost didn't bother to relocate the heavy lens and tripod to photograph the Wren because of notions about clean foreground and background in a wildlife image. Experience can be a double-edged sword: it can help us quickly recognize potential for a good image, but it can also prevent us from experimenting with new ideas. For me, this photo is a constant reminder that sometimes it pays to break a few photographic rules and notions.

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