waiting

My neighbour called me over lunch a few days ago saying that "a hawk or an owl" was sitting in one of her trees. It didn't take long for me to pick up the 500mm and try to capture the animal. Turns out it was this young Sharp-shinned Hawk. The bird looked large to me so I assume this one was a female. She was definitely in hunting mode, and I made a series of images like this one as she looked intently at a potential prey item.

The old lilac tree in which the bird was perched was a mess, so for presentation I have cleaned up a lot of branches in the BG. Image was cropped and sharpened, and a slight increase in colour saturation was made. Comments welcome.

Canon EOS 50D, 500/4 x 1.4 tc = 700mm (hand-held resting on fence)
capture date: 8 January 2010, 1:48 PM
exposure program: Aperture Priority
ISO speed: 400
shutter speed: 1/250
aperture: f6.3
exposure bias: +1.0 (to compensate for bright highlights in BG)
metering: Pattern
light source: Auto
flash: OFF

Hi John

I like the muted tones of this image and complimentary colours of the birds and branches. You captured some good eye contact too. I would prefer if the right hand branch did not cut up through behind the bird but had some space to actually frame the bird between the two branches. This bird reminds me very much the sparowhawk we have in the UK.

Cheers

Rich

like the image particularly the eyes congrats!

I like the eye contact and the pose. It is always nice to do birding from your home.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

I really like the stare/pose, showing intensity. Sharpening and color both look very good. Not knowing what you've already cloned out, I wonder if you could have moved to your right in order to get a clean shot of the head without the branch behind it?

Well composed John and that in credible stare puts it over the top . Love it.

Nice and sharp and to get it at 700mm and 1/250 while resting on a fence is pretty nice as well. Dave

I like this image for the above reasons. Believe it or not, with some work, I think you could successfully remove the background branch. The perch for this bird has a lot of appeal, (I love the lichens) but the branch behind the bird is too close to the same tonality of the bird. If you do that, this great shot will become a stunner. (I have been working on my photo shop skills as this years resolutin)

Agree for the most part with what the others said. I might add that it looks like there are some slight repetitions in the lichen pattern just above the head, heading to the left? Maybe a repeated clone stamp? Looks easy to remove. Nice shot though

Thanks for all the great comments so far. Nope, no cloning done to the branches that are there- just masked them out of I needed to, before removing the offending branches.

I will give the right-hand branch a shot. I'm NOT looking forward to it and would love to learn a magic bullet method- what worries me most is all the fine detail around the bird's head and upper breast.

Hi Jonn Neat sharp image. Could it be a Coopers Hawk, the tail is rounded at the end not squared like a Sharpie?
Ted