![\"red-tailed](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/red-tailed-hawk-5021-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a01\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 400, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n This immature Red-tailed Hawk on Antelope Island\u00a0chose to land on a rock perch that was too close to me with the teleconverter attached so I cut off a wing (the image is very near full frame)\u00a0but I still thought the landing pose was pretty neat, especially with the extended talons and the flared tail.<\/p>\n But there’s something visually\u00a0incongruous about this image – something that just doesn’t fit with everything else that our\u00a0eyes and brains tell us.\u00a0 Before you scroll down any further,\u00a0do you see it?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why isn’t the rock the bird is landing on just as sharp as the hawk?\u00a0 It should be – after all the talons (and much of the rest of the bird) must be in the same focal plane as the rock since they’re apparently touching at this point.\u00a0 The rock isn’t moving, which eliminates motion blur.\u00a0 I have plenty of shutter speed to get the moving bird sharp so why isn’t the stationary rock (or at least the upper part of it that’s in the same focal plane) just as sharp?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a01\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 400, natural light, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n An image taken just after the bird landed reveals the answer.\u00a0 That rock wasn’t the perch after all.\u00a0 The actual\u00a0perch is another slightly\u00a0lower\u00a0rock behind it that we can’t see.\u00a0 It’s just that the position of the talons relative to the foreground rock in the\u00a0first image\u00a0unequivocally tells our brains that it\u00a0is about to be the perch.\u00a0 We have to see evidence like the second image to get things straightened out again – at least I do…<\/p>\n Notice that the smaller rock under and slightly behind the tail is apparently in the same focal plane as the actual perch.<\/p>\n Normally when I attempt landing shots I find it a little easier to prefocus on the perch if I can predict it but this time there were so many potential rock perches in the area that my only real chance was to focus on the bird in flight and hope that I could keep locked on as it landed.\u00a0 In this case, if I had prefocused on what I thought was about to become\u00a0the perch, the\u00a0hawk would have been soft.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n Note:\u00a0 When you’re using long lenses your depth of field is surprisingly shallow.\u00a0 For those of you\u00a0who might like to check the depth of field available with your own camera and lenses, here’s a handy-dandy depth of field calculator<\/a> that I really like.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Raptor landing shots are one of my most difficult photographic challenges and I attempt them every reasonable chance I get. This one turned out to be unexpectedly interesting, at least from a photographer’s point of view.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n