Turkey Vulture with a sky backgroundTurkey Vulture with a sky background – Nikon D300, f8, 1/800, ISO 640, +0.7 EV, Nikkor 200-400mm VR with 1.4x TC at 400mm, natural light, not baited

Last week while photographing in a canyon in the Stansbury Mountains in Tooele County, Utah I spotted this Turkey Vulture roosting in a dead tree in morning light. For this first image we moved to a location that had plain sky in the background so the background is rather simple, some might even say it is plain or boring.

Turkey Vulture with trees in the backgroundTurkey Vulture with trees in the background – Nikon D300, f9, 1/400, ISO 640, Nikkor 200-400mm VR with 1.4x TC at 400mm, natural light, not baited

After photographing the Turkey Vulture in the first location we moved a bit to the east which changed the background from sky to the trees across the canyon, because the tree were a distance away from the vulture my choice of aperture and the bokeh of my lens smoothed out the trees to a  soft blur, enough to be recognizable as trees but out of focus enough to not compete with the subject.

Turkey Vulture with sky and trees in the backgroundTurkey Vulture with sky and trees in the background – Nikon D300, f9, 1/500, ISO 640, +0.7 EV, Nikkor 200-400mm VR with 1.4x TC at 400mm, natural light, not baited

By moving a bit west we were able to get a few of the out of focus trees in the lower portion of the frame with blue sky above them.

I really don’t have a favorite among these three images, I like the different backgrounds in all of them. By moving a bit one way or the other though a photographer can change what is in the background slightly which can make an image more or less appealing.

Does one of these backgrounds appeal to you more than others?

Disclaimer: The bottom two images had a small bleached twig visible in the top left corner of each frame, I did remove those by cloning out the tip of the twig. It was not visible in the cropped version of the first image because our location was furthest west.

Mia