Juvenile Hawk Playing

Image Critiques
1

Juvenile Hawk Playing
Juvenile Hawk Playing2793×1990 832 KB

Critique Style: Standard

The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.

Feedback Focus: Artistic / Expressive

About This Image

We have a family of hawks living in one of the trees next to my house. We’ve watched the juveniles grow and now they are out and exploring the world. This hawk landed in the side yard, started playing with an acorn by throwing it up and then pouncing on it. The hawk then fly away with the acorn in its beak (which I have another photo of that one). I do not have a birding lens and this guy unexpectedly landed while I was watching TV haha so I grabbed the longest lens I have 100mm macro and then tried to get as close as I could.

Feedback Requested

Is there a way (minus a longer reach lens) to make the hawk stick out a bit more? I know the background is very busy but since I had to work with where the hawk landed are there tricks to draw the hawk out a bit more? I have cropped in close, masked the hawk and increased his exposure, sharpness, and levels. I inverted the hawk mask and tried to slightly desaturate the background and take the clarity down a bit. I worry about cropping any closer because I don’t know if there would be enough megapixels left.

Technical Details

100mm (crop sensor camera), f5.0, 1/2000s, ISO1600

2

Hi Jay,

You have a lot of action going on here and looks like your shutter speed was enough to stop the action. The highlights and exposure need to be reduced and a tighter crop will bring out hawk’s eye better and framed with that arching wing. I edited your image using the Camera Raw filter and reduced exposure, whites, and highlights to retrieve feather detail. Then, I cropped this down to show off this hawk and strengthen the comp. You may want to rework your RAW file to see what you get. A nice post…Jim

hawk-7

3

Thanks for the tips! I recovered some of the feather detail and cropped in tighter. I usually don’t print my images but I may see what this one looks like as a 5x7 or 8x10 just to get an idea of how tight I can crop things on my camera. Thanks again!

4

Hi Jay, nice capture of the hawk in action. I like Jim’s tips and his result is an improvement for sure.