Roadside Hawk

[Nelson Mena Alfaro]

Hi everybody, this is a really common hawk in Costa Rica but really hard to find in a good perch with a good background, i found this one on the way to dominical about 20km from Perez Zeledón.

iso 640, f/10, 1/400 av +2/3
60d+100-400 L is hh

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8027302...ream/lightbox/

[Randy Stout]

Nelson:

Great eye contact, handsome bird, interesting perch.

The details on the bird look a bit soft. I might consider trading a bit of DOF for a higher shutter speed.

The bright white areas in the background, esp. by the shoulder, are a bit distracting. A slight shift to your right might have put him against a more uniform green background.

Cheers

Randy

[arash_hazeghi]

nice head angle and eye contact, I agree the bird looks soft and BG is a bit distracting here.

[Marina Scarr]

Did you use a lot of noise reduction on this image? I am trying to figure out why at F10 you have little details in your feathers. Your speed should have been enough and I am not seeing motion blur. Whites in the BG are quite distracting here, but you had a good pose on your raptor.

[Nelson Mena Alfaro]

i think it looks soft because of big crop, this is maybe little less than 1/3 of the original frame,
i usually use value 1 at noise reduction only to the background, and use unsharpmask on the bird...i also work on the eyes on LR with brush, selected it, apply some clarity, and NR
i also cloned some white background up in the right corner, trying to eliminate the distracting whites, but if i clone all the image will look fake in my opinion.

should i clone all white spots??????????
thanks for the comments, i seek for knowledge, and learn new things :)

[Marina Scarr]

There is no need to clone out the whites pots here, Nelson. If the bird were really sharp with this crop, I would suggest you give it a try. However, I am not seeing details in your feathers. You have a great pose, exposure looks good but with this large of a crop, you are going to lose image quality...which appears to be what has happened here. My advice would be to go back out and try again. When you see a background like this one, see if there is anywhere you can move to put your bird in front of a different more even background. I realize that is not always possible, believe me.

[Nelson Mena Alfaro]

well next time ill try to find it with a good background but thats about luck hehe, http://www.flickr.com/photos/8027302...ream/lightbox/
thats the link where you can see it bigger, maybe it loose quality when i post a photo here,

[Marina Scarr]

It does look a little better bigger, but I am still seeing a lack of quality/details. Look at how smooth the wing feathers look and how you don't have details there for example. Making a large crop of an image can really hurt the quality.

[Nelson Mena Alfaro]

hehe i work a lot on this photo, i show the full frame of the photo