Red-tailed Hawk

[Alison McCoy]

Just trying to take the sharpest images I can. Took this at the Klamath Basin Wildlife Refuge last weekend. Rested the lens on a puffin pad on the car window ledge.

Specs:
Canon 7D, Sigma 50mm-500mm/ shot at 244mm
Sunny Day
ISO 100
f/7.1
1/200 sec

I think the bg is a little busy but I am not sure how to fix that. Any suggestions or comments are welcome.

[Doug West]

The one thing you could try with the background is to put it on its own layer. A
pply some gaussian blur to throw it a little out of focus.

Because the sun doesn't seem to be at your back, the bird is in shadow. With
your background on its own layer, return to the bird and try to brighten it a bit,
but not to much, cause if you do, you'll start to see digital noise.

He looks sharp, so I think its worth it to try what I suggested.

Doug

[Faraaz Abdool]

Allison - given that this was shot at 244mm, if you shot it at a longer focal length and turned the camera vertical to create a portrait, the BG would've had a higher degree of blurring. And it would've been less busy. Other than that, I echo Doug's valid points above. Very sharp shot.

[Doug West]

**Disclaimer** This isn't meant to be even close to perfect, just wanted to show you
Alison what you have to play with

All I did was play with the Shadow/Highlight filter, gaus blurred the background and
an itsy bitsy piece of sharpening. It kinda stinks cause I didn't take the time to put
anything on its own layer and work that way. Like I said, just wanted to put something
in your head on something to think about.

I also used Faraaz's idea of going portrait.



Doug

[Bobo Madar]

I like the shot, sharp and all to the twinkle in the eye. As others have said, background is a bit busy but still nice overall.

[Alison McCoy]

Thanks Faraaz. I did not think of that while shooting. It would have been the better way to go. Doug your version looks so much better. Thanks for taking the time to play with the image. I will do what you did and see if I can duplicate the effects. Thanks so much!

[John Chardine]

Hi Alison- I like the duotone look. Your subject is almost backlit so the it's in the shadow. The bird could be brightened like Doug has done. I would recommend using the Shadow and Blacks sliders in Adobe Camera Raw (if you shoot RAW!) to do this because you will be working on the RAW data which contains a tonne of information. You could also try using the centre slider in Levels and brighten up the mid-tones of the whole image. Blurring is one option for the BG but you could just use the dodge and burn tools to smooth out the tonality.