It was back to the Klamath Basin this week and the stars of the show this month were the hawks. On the second day there it was cloudy and there were hawks roosting in every tree and on many a sign post. But this one was taken on the first day when there was more blue in the sky. I love the way he is just hanging on by a few toes. I learned a new trick for identifying a Red Tail Hawk in my bird class. Though they come in many color configurations, they always have the dark belly bad which shows up well here.
In post processing I first cropped to a vertical. It is kind of a miracle that this one came out sharp in the first place as I was shooting hand held out the passenger side from the driver’s seat so I couldn’t take advantage of my bean bag. Long story short, it would have been nearly impossible to shoot this vertically in that situation.
I brightened it up a little using levels in Photoshop. Then into Color Efex Pro for detail, saturation (brilliance/warmth) and a little highlighting on the center and darkening on the edges. It looked a little noisy to me so I took it through Topaz DeNoise then used smart sharpen in Photoshop to recover some of the sharpness that was lost in the denoise process.
I’m behind the curve on my Klamath basin blog so look for a couple of catch up posts at http://jeannehoadley.com/Klamath by the end of next week.