Cooper's Hawk

[Doug Brown]

I just returned from a weekend in Texas with my friend Alan Murphy. We photographed the fall raptor migration from a blind using techniques from Alan's excellent new ebook "The Photographer's Guide to Attracting Birds." Raptors are notoriously skittish, but with Alan's techniques we spent the weekend photographing them with a 300mm lens, sometimes inside our minimum focus distance! While a small distance to subject is great for bird portraits, it makes flight photography very challenging. Because the birds are so close (and such fast flyers) they move across your field of view very quickly, and because they were approaching from behind the blind you couldn't see them coming. Here's one of my favorites from our Sunday session. I applied some background cleanup to the image.



Canon 1D Mark IV, 300mm, f/4.5, 1/4000, ISO 400, manual exposure, hand held

[Vivaldo Damilano]

Gorgeous image Doug, fantastic detail, banking pose and sharpness. Love the FG grass and BG. I must get the ebook, sound like one can have plenty fun calling and getting in so close to these birds.

[Randy Stout]

Doug:'

Excellent light with great feather detail, nice eye, sharp, well exposed.

A bit more bank towards us to get the far wing up would have been perfect.

There is a tiny piece of debris? between the tip of the 2nd and 3rd tail feather from the bottom.

Sounds like you had a great time!

Cheers

Randy

[Cheryl Arena Molennor]

Great job getting this Doug with such close focal range Nice detail too

[Sanjeevprakash]

Superb Shot.Nice eye contact.

[David Salem]

That is awesome. Perfect HA, exposure, and BG. The feather detail is great and comp is perfect. Besides the left wing position, as good as it gets. Well done...

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Doug, tack sharp, and just love the near wing and fanned tail. The hawk really pops from the BG, and glad you left a hint of grasses below.

[Doug Brown]

Thanks Randy. I'll clean up that debris by the tail feathers. Not sure how I missed it.

[Satish Ranadive]

Wonderful flight shot.Great pose,lovely colors and details.Love it.

Regards,
Satish.

[Jon Swanson]

Love the fanned tail. It would be even better with a little more of a head turn towards the camera and if the head was separated from the aft wing. But wing birds don't always do what we want them to do :)

[Karl Egressy]

Excellent BIF image of this species, Doug. Love the fanned tail, head turn, eye contact and backgrounf. Exposure looks spot on, great feather details and the bird pops against terestial background.

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Stunning image with great detail and shark as tack! Great HA and eye contact Doug! Did you even get to use the 600 II or the 300 was adequate in that setting?
Regards
Sanjeev

[Andre van As]

Hi Dan
What a powerful and dynamic pose! How far away do you estimate you were?

Andre

[Frank Schauf]

Nice in flight pose, good capture.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Doug -

Thanks for sharing. Very nice capture with great detail throughout. I hope to see some more from this series.

Looking forward to buying one of Alan's books, just need to decide which one I want!

Miguel

[Ivan Ellison]

I think this is superb, great detail and the eye is stunning. Knowing how hard our sparrowhawks are to get in flight I can appreciate the hard work that goes into these shots.Well done.

[arash_hazeghi]

this is awesome man! wish it was mine

but you were cheating with that short lens

[dankearl]

That is a killer shot, very sharp, a split second later for the far wing to drop and it would be over the top.

[Doug Brown]

Repost to fix the debris that Randy pointed out.

[Kiran Poonacha]

Great Image Doug Bhai... all said above. well done... regards, Kiran.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Cool looking bird, love the light and pose, lucky you!

[Robert Holguin]

Suoerb shot!!!
Excellent head angle, great background, and nice detail.
Well done.

[gareth thomson]

The intensity of that gaze is mesmerizing. Great capture. You must have had a blast. In another femtosecond, yep, the other wing would have been in a great position, but then the front wing might not have been. Maybe when Canikon bring out a rig that shoots at 30 frames per second, there won't be any excuses.... Beauty shot.

[Melvin Grey]

Beautiful quality image Doug. Sounds like you certainly had fun - and made the most of it.

[Doug Brown]

Thanks for taking the time to comment everyone!