My photos in the cold yesterday morning were actually sharp! Thanks to a friend I may (or may not) have arrived at a partial solution to my problem with soft photos while shooting from my pickup in unusually cold temperatures.
Bird photographers never know what we’ll see in our photos that we didn’t notice in the field. My shots of this Prairie Falcon taken two days ago surprised me in more ways than one.
Yesterday morning we finally had some light around here and I even found some beautiful birds to take advantage of it. This Golden Eagle is one of them.
This shot from yesterday morning came very close to being one of my favorite kestrel photos of all time.
If you think birds don’t notice the little things you’d be wrong. This male American Kestrel is the proof in the pudding.
Plus my worst bad habit as a photographer (I have other bad habits but most of them don’t involve photography).
This first photo shows the result of a “plop” landing in the snow. The second shot isn’t much more dignified.
The dark color morph of the Ferruginous Hawk is unusual, significantly less than 10% of the population in North America. Since Ferruginous Hawks of any color are uncommon (Sibley calls them “rare”), the dark morph is a very narrow slice of that uncommon group and Ferruginous Hawks in general are such regal and impressive hawks I’ve been enamored of this bird ever since I found “him” a couple of weeks ago.
As a bird photographer I’m usually cussing the wind but yesterday morning I was grateful for a stiff breeze.
This is the same hawk I photographed in flight from far away a week ago but I found him again yesterday morning and this time he was close. And he’s a dark morph by golly!
Two raptors that caught my eye recently because of their out of the ordinary plumages.
