Couple of Red Tail Hawk shots

kdog

The Hudson River Eagles are gone for the season now, but I think I've found a new critter to stalk. Seems we have some Red Tails in the area. Here are my first attempts.

Note how small this critter looks in the tree.



However, get them in the air, and suddenly they're magestic.





Thanks fer lookin'.
-joel

(Pics updated with Nick's noise reduction tip).

davev

Nice shots. The light in the 3 pic is great.

Harryb

Outstanding shots Joel. Some of your best work yet.

kdog

davev wrote:

Nice shots. The light in the 3 pic is great.

Thanks, Dave!

ginger_55

I have a fondness for Red Tailed Hawks. A pair were/was my first raptor shot. However, I rarely see them, don't know where to stalk them around here.

Yours are especially nice, as you say those flight shots are majestic!

ginger

Dick on Aruba

Amazing bird, great pics. Well done Joel.

Dick.

kdog

Harryb wrote:

Outstanding shots Joel. Some of your best work yet.

Thank you, sir! I appreciate it.

-joel

kdog

ginger_55 wrote:

I have a fondness for Red Tailed Hawks. A pair were/was my first raptor shot. However, I rarely see them, don't know where to stalk them around here.

Yours are especially nice, as you say those flight shots are majestic!

ginger

Thanks, Ginger. Having seen them quite a few times around here, I'm very happy to have gotten some clean shots at one.

-joel

Rohirrim

Very nice set of shots Joel. Couple nice in flight shots. There does seem to be a lot of noise in the photos, were you shooting at a high ISO?

gluwater

Great in flight shots Joel. It might help the photos a bit to blur the noisy sky a little. Just use Select>Color Range and then Filter>Noise>Median to only adjust the sky. I did it quickly here. If you want me to take this down I glady will, I just wanted to show the difference it makes.

kdog

D200-D70 wrote:

Amazing bird, great pics. Well done Joel.

Dick.

Thank you, sir!

kdog

Rohirrim wrote:

Very nice set of shots Joel. Couple nice in flight shots. There does seem to be a lot of noise in the photos, were you shooting at a high ISO?

Thanks, Steve!

The first shot in the tree was at ISO200, F5.6, 400mm, with the 100-400. I went back and reprocessed it, discovering I'd goofed the original. All my pictures are cropped to 800 pixels max. It turns out for that shot it ended up upsamping the picture which didn't help. Here is a reprocessing of that first shot. This is a 100% crop with a little selective sharpening.



The other two shots were ISO400. The noise you were seeing on those two shots -- was it just sky noise? Or can you see noise in the boid as well?

Thanks again for the comments and critique.

-joel

kdog

gluwater wrote:

Great in flight shots Joel. It might help the photos a bit to blur the noisy sky a little. Just use Select>Color Range and then Filter>Noise>Median to only adjust the sky. I did it quickly here. If you want me to take this down I glady will, I just wanted to show the difference it makes.

Nick,

Thanks for an incredibly useful tip!!! I'm just blown away at how well that works. :oogle

Here, I've redone the two flight shots.





That tip is going into my bag of tricks for sure. Thanks so much.

-joel