White Tailed Hawk (I Think)

After a frustrating day at the Aransas NWR with nothing to shoot, I was rewarded with this image of a White Tailed Hawk (my first) on my way back to Houston for a family wedding event along the coast route.

1DX
500f4 II + 2X III
!/2000
F8
ISO-800
Handheld
Manual Exposure

I wish I had used F10 or lower ISO as I had shutter speed to spare. But hand holding the rig in the vertical was difficult and I couldn't think of anything else.

Cropped mainly to level and rotate the image
Removed a distracting branch
(I have not learned how to apply NR to the BG yet, so left it alone)
Appreciate your comments and feedback.

Thank you

Loi

Nice capture of a not so seen raptor. Looks like an adult white tailed hawk to me too. The leaves are blocking the tail but the exposure and the detail look great. Nice work.

Good: Nice and sharp with good IQ and eye contact. Very cool bird. Not as good: Harsh light and distracting twigs. Not sure about the shooting situation but stepping a foot to the left might have given you a clear shot. As far as NR on the BG, the easiest way is to run NR on the whole image and mask out the bird. Search for a basic masking tutorial on youtube. Its pretty simple and once you get it down it's really fast. You can also do this with sharpening, although in that case you would mask out the bg of course.

Great input by Steve....cool hawk, and I think you are correct with your ID.
Did you try any frames with the 1.4 off?/bird smaller in the frame, but with more dof, and the possibility
of working in some of the branches/leaves more successfully into the composition? That's one thought,
another thought would be to wait until the hawk gave you a head turn more to it's right, to show the bill
in profile and eliminate the darkly shadowed side of the face....

Good suggestion give by above posters. Nice and sharp with good details on the bird. The catch light really draw attention to the eye very well. I see a bit of halo on the twig and right wing of the bird (left of viewer) which probably come from sharpening, when you master masking in photoshop you can use it to help reducing halo effect when sharpening.

Good details and I see nothing wrong with the dof and think f8 was sufficient. All great suggestions above. I wish the bird was a little higher in the frame and would remove the twig/leaves touching the birds wing if you are ok with that.

Thank you everyone for your comments. I will for sure learn how to do nR on the BG, but I'm on the road now and that will have to wait.

Steve, the light wasn't all that bad. It was taken at 9AM abut 2 hours after sunrise. I cut down the exposure by 1/3 Ev here and it looks fine.

And the reason I wish I had used an F10 is because of the 2X, not DOF. With the 2X, I get sharper images by stopping down a little bit.

I do have many other images of this bird, but will need to sort thru carefully since not all of them are sharp. Handholding 1000-mm on a static object up high is really hard.

Thanks again.

Loi

I think the RP is still too bright. I got a couple of hours on a flight home and worked on it some more. I also removed the branch that touched the bird. Hope you will like this version better.

Thank you!

Loi