To Live & Die In My Backyard - Cooper's Hawk

[Photo-John]

A couple of days before Christmas I caught this cooper's hawk with a fresh kill, in my backyard. I grabbed the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the 14-150mm zoom, which has a 300mm equivalent telephoto focal length. Even though the hawk was only about 30 feet away, that still wasn't long enough. Luckily, I also have the Olympus 70-300mm, which is a 600mm equivalent on the long end. It worked great. I was able to shoot from my deck without disturbing the bird and took nearly 100 pictures.

[Photo-John]

It sure was tough to cull them down, but here are a few more.







This last one is one of my favorites, in spite of it being a tad softer than the others here. I never would have thought it would eat a foot - claws and all. You'd think that would cause some problems in its stomach. Guess not.

[dana m.]

Beautiful pictures John...I tried hard to put the pieces back together to figure out what kind of bird the kill was, or did you even know?

[Photo-John]

Beautiful pictures John...I tried hard to put the pieces back together to figure out what kind of bird the kill was, or did you even know?

I have no idea what it was. When I came up from the office and looked out the window, it was already in the condition you see it, here.

[ksbryan0]

Nice shots of a great backyard visitor! That Olympus did a nice job and seems to have metered the snow well, too!

[Photo-John]

Nice shots of a great backyard visitor! That Olympus did a nice job and seems to have metered the snow well, too!

The Olympus did a great job. I did do a fair amount of post-processing to get it to look this good, though. The light was really flat and I underexposed because of the snow. I brightened them up by about a stop and made color corrections to the RAW images in Lightroom. Then I fine-tuned them in Photoshop with a levels adjustment layer.

[ksbryan0]

I did do a fair amount of post-processing to get it to look this good, though.

That makes sense, as it would be a tough metering situation for any camera. Still made for some nice images.

[Photo-John]

That makes sense, as it would be a tough metering situation for any camera. Still made for some nice images.

Tough metering and crappy light. I was also fudging my exposure a bit to keep the shutter speed up without going past ISO 800. Based on the amount of correction I made in post, I probably would have been better off just going to ISO 1600. On the other hand, they did turn out pretty good. It's really amazing to me what Olympus has been able to squeeze out of the Four Thirds sensor.