![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/red-tailed-hawk-3981c-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-3981c-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nAnd how I responded to conflicting cues of true level when rotating this\u00a0image to “apparent” level.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes when we’re photographing birds as they rouse we get some pretty goofy poses and I often enjoy seeing images like that because rousing is a behavior I’m interested in and besides, they often amuse me.<\/p>\n I photographed this juvenile Red-tailed Hawk one year ago today as it roused with enthusiasm and abandon and yup, it makes me smile. Every feather seems to be flying whichaway and even the tail is skewed at an unusual angle. It was such a vigorous shake that I was surprised there weren’t any small feathers flying off the bird, as often happens in\u00a0situations like\u00a0this.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ok, the rest of this post may only be of interest to photographers.<\/p>\n It was a bit of a challenge to rotate this\u00a0image to apparent level and\u00a0this version of the\u00a0photo isn’t my final choice. It’s been rotated to make the fence wire level but I know it wasn’t and doing so made the light-colored bands in the background appear tilted clockwise. To me those bands are pretty dominant in the image and their tilted angle bothers me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A looser experimental\u00a0crop of the same image\u00a0gave me\u00a0another visual cue – the metal fence posts on either side of the hawk. This version of the photo was rotated to make the metal posts vertical\u00a0(yes, it’s a leap of faith\u00a0to assume that they really were…)\u00a0which came quite close to leveling the colored bands . It also put the wire at an angle but I’m\u00a0fine with that because I don’t believe it really was level.<\/p>\n So this is the rotation I decided on…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n and a tighter crop of that same version (in order to lose the ugly metal posts) became my final choice. It’s a compromise between conflicting cues of apparent level but overall it’s the one I prefer. Others may have made a different choice and that’s ok.<\/p>\n After all, to varying degrees\u00a0many photographs are only an interpretation of reality anyway.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And how I responded to conflicting cues of true level when rotating this image to “apparent” level.<\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/red-tailed-hawk-3981b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-3981b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/red-tailed-hawk-3981-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-3981-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n