Tricky angle

[dadas115]

Yesterday morning on my way to work I stopped by a local park to see if I could spot any interesting waterfowl. I didn’t find any ducks on the pond but I did find this watchful red-shouldered hawk looking for his next meal on a snag not too far from shore. I tried a couple of shots at him with my Rebel XT and EF 500mm f/4.5L USM mounted on a tripod but unfortunately the background was a rather unpleasant overcast sky with lots of small branches. You can see the full frame of what I got in the first picture.

I later went back and tried my PS skills to bring out some color and detail in the hawk and to remove some of the clutter in the background. I used partial metering for the shot but still the picture suffers from back-lighting. I was hesitant to try to push the exposure too far because the shot was taken at ISO 800 and the shadow noise gets out of control pretty fast when the exposure is adjusted. The second picture is the result of my efforts.

After getting the first shot on the tripod and being a bit disappointed with what I was seeing on the LCD screen of the rebel I decided that I had nothing to lose and went for a slightly better angle on the bird. I popped the lens off the tripod and made an attempt at a hand-held shot. This time I tried to position myself so that there was more in the background than just the blah overcast sky and twigs. It took a few tries at ISO 800 and 1/60 sec but I think I got a usable shot. The exposure came out a bit better (probably due to less back-lighting) I went ahead and adjusted the exposure slightly, cloned out a couple of twigs and upped the saturation some. Finally I applied a small amount of USM and ended up with the third picture. Does it work??

Thanks,

Greg