Gliders and Hawks

kdog

I decided to take a little trip to a park with some hills near the SF Bay to look for hawks. I ended up hiking along with a fellow that was carrying two rather large RC gliders up the steep hillside.

The guy launched one and it took me about 2 seconds to realize that this would be a great opportunity to experiment with focus modes on my Canon 7D.



One gets all the same issues photographing these things as you do real hawks -- the rapid movements, the busy backgrounds, etc.


Although it looks tiny in the pics, this glider has a 6.5' wingspan.


Suddenly a hawk comes into view and (and here you were starting to get worried. :giggle )



He spies the sail plane...




and the encounter begins.






I'm told this behavior is very common in the spring during mating season, but not so common this time of year. Apparently this is a juvenile red tail, so maybe he hadn't gotten the memo.





So there it is. One never knows what you may stumble across when you go shooting. Thanks for looking. :thumb

-joel

Harryb

ou had me worried for a bit there Joel. Really interesting series of captures. How did your experiment with the focus modes come out?

kdog

Thanks, Harry! It was a real kick to see and even had the glider pilot worried there for a second.

On the AF testing, I was experimenting with Zone AF in servo mode for tracking BIFs. I normally shoot center-point if the bird is against a messy background and expanded AF with a BIF against the sky. So I was interested in trying out Zone AF which in theory should make it easier to keep focus locked on your moving subject. It's a real test for the tracking computer, particularly for tracking against land in the background. In Zone mode you have this matrix of 9 AF points, so a much larger window keep on your target and hence a lot easier. The camera illuminates the points in the matrix that are actually locked onto your target so you can see exactly where the camera is focusing. Super cool! It feels like some kind of star wars tracking system watching the focus points dance around on your target as you're panning. Not that you have much control over which points are locking on, but at least can you tell exactly when focus jumps to your background so that you know to reacquire. That's probably old-hat to most of you, but it was new to me. Then the other thing I was playing with was adjusting tracking sensitivity which counterintuitively you want to slow down so that the computer isn't constantly trying to find something new in the frame to lock on to. All in all I was pretty impressed how well it was working. It wasn't perfect and still jumped to the background a lot, but I'm thinking it's at least as good as I can do on my own with centerpoint tracking. Although it's hard to know for sure.

I guess I got a bit carried away here. Sorry you asked?

Ric Grupe

As long as the glider doesn't attempt food removal tactics.....

Very cool, Joel.

PGM

These are great, Joel! I wonder what the hawk was thinking? New playmate? Potential dinner? Best, Pam