![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/swainsons-hawk-1649-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"swainsons-hawk-1649-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nPhotographs, even bird photographs, are often much more meaningful to the photographer who took them than they are to the casual observer. Here’s an example, and the reason why.<\/p>\n
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1\/250, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n I photographed this intermediate morph Swainson’s Hawk six days ago in the very early morning. “He’ was close and quite patient with me, probably in part because it was before sunrise so the light was very low, as evidenced by my shutter speed. You don’t see Ron Dudley photographing birds with a shutter speed of only 1\/250 very often.<\/p>\n When I first started photographing him there was no hint of direct light anywhere in my photos but by the time I took this shot there was a blush of rosy red on the mountains in the background as the sun began to peek over the horizon far to the east. To the casual observer this is just another hawk on a post but to me it’s more than that, in part because I know the backstory so I have the memories to go along with the image.<\/p>\n It was taken at 6:19 AM and I had to drive for an hour and a half in the dark to get to this remote area before sunrise. That meant getting up before 3 AM so I had time to finish and publish that day’s blog post and get my act together generally before leaving home before 5 AM. I’m an early bird by nature but that’s early, even for me.<\/p>\n One of my many rewards was experiencing sunrise and the resulting rosy glow on the mountains in the background of this photo, mountains that I was close to all morning but most folks see only from a distance. If they ever see them at all.<\/p>\n I have those memories and others attached to the image so for me it’s more than just another photo of a hawk on a post.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photographs, even bird photographs, are often much more meaningful to the photographer who took them than they are to the casual observer. Here’s an example, and the reason why.\u00a0<\/p>\n