Cooper's Hawk

[Chris Johnston]

Ok, this is my first post so be gentle. I noticed a Cooper's Hawk outside my front door yesterday and after about 300 frames of trying to get the male in flight I decided to use my iPhone to play some calls and draw them in. I used Siri and searched for Cooper's Hawk calls and got the Cornell Ornithology Lab and they had 4 different calls. The young hawk distress call made this little guy practically land on my head and brought in the bigger female too. She wasn't in a clear spot so I don't have good images of her.

I shot this with my 7D and the Canon 100-400 lens. It was shot @400mm, f/7.1, 1/250 sec, and ISO 800, in manual mode, using evaluative metering. I was shooting handheld and using IS mode 2 (I forgot to switch back to 1 after the inflight shots). I cropped it in using Lightroom 3, used Nik Dfine to reduce the background noise, changed the background from green to brown using Nik Color Efex Indian Summer filter, and then I used Viveza 2 to boost the eye color a little bit and lighten up some shadows.

[Joel Eade]

Congrats on an excellent first post!!! Your exposure is spot on and the eye/head is critically sharp, as it should be. The only suggestion I would have is to crop a sliver off the right and add some to the left and on top. Since the bird is looking toward the left a little space for the him to "look into" on that side would help. Fantastic encounter with this raptor, hopefully your luck will continue and you will continue to share it with us!

[Chris Johnston]

Based on the input here is another version

[Joel Eade]

I like the repost better, still think it's an excellent first post, very well done!

[Rachel Hollander]

Chris - Welcome and excellent first post! I prefer the repost but still think the image is a tad dark and that the hawk can be separated from the bg a bit. I took the liberty of trying to extract a little more detail with a levels adjustment applied selectively to the hawk by sliding both the middle (to 1.10) and right slider (to 1.25) to the left and then applying an s-curve curves adjustment for contrast. A lot of these adjustments are to individual taste so play around a bit. I did this very quickly and you should be able to do much more with the RAW file. It could probably also use a little more sharpening which I did not do.

TFS,
Rachel

[Don Railton]

Hi Chris.

firstly welcome. What a great first post...! The OP is tight in the frame I feel but your repost is much better. I like what Rachel has done, it takes it up a notch again and agree that it could take a little more sharpening. well done.

DON

[David N Smith]

Welcome Chris and great first post. I also like the repost better.

Dave

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Chris, big welcome to BPN and the Eager To Learn forum. Your first post is a very nice one, good job on the capture. We look forward to seeing more of your images.

The original post has the bird too far to the left of the frame, and the eye is drawn to the background space on the right. The first thing I would suggest is to crop from the right even farther than you did in the repost. The classic 3/4 portrait would have the right edge at about the middle of the back. Here is my take on the crop, and I also did some sharpening and levels adjustment like in Rachel's nice re-do. You have nice detail and color rendition, just a little bit of sharpening and level boost and the image is a wall-hanger. I also did some cleanup of the LLC using the clone tool, as there was some busy-ness there that tempted the eye. Nice job, keep them coming!

[Chris Johnston]

Thanks to all of you for the input. Joining this site has been such a help over the past few weeks. I've been lurking until now. Now back to the photo.

I've already tried putting the bird on a new layer and doing a levels adjustment and the results were awesome. I'm going to try some selective sharpening and cleanup the LLC and see how it looks. If I like, I'll send it Bay Photo for printing and framing.

[Kerry Perkins]

Chris, this will make an excellent print!